Tag Archives: health

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. In The New Yorker, John Cassidy reviews a new free online open-source economics textbook, The Economy. From an international collaboration of economists, it focuses on newer, post-financial crisis ways of thinking about and teaching economics. Case Western economist Justin Gallagher documents the bizarre fight he went through to get one research group at the University of Texas to turn over the public state data set it was...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. In a clever online nudging experiment, 627,000 online taxpayers in Guatemala were given one of five different kinds of honesty messages, reminders about public goods, or legal warnings in a captcha. But none of the messages had any effect on taxes paid. Some unexpected side effects of antimalarial insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs): We show that ITNs reduced all-cause child mortality, but surprisingly increased total fertility...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. North Korea’s surprising, lucrative relationship with Africa (via Kim Yi Dionne) In an inexplicable lapse some congressional staffer has surely been punished for, the House Foreign Affairs Committee invited three eminently qualified women to testify about women’s empowerment in the developing world. Even more encouraging was that the hearing was titled “Beyond Microfinance.” Mary Ellen Iskenderian, head of the financial...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. We don’t do enough thinking in the U.S., much less in developing countries, about end of life “palliative” care, helping people with difficult terminal illnesses suffer less. But a lot of suffering happens at the end of life; if your goal is to alleviate suffering, pain management is doable. The BBC has a very interesting story of the woman who singlehandedly brought palliative care to Mongolia. David Evans summarizes a post and...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Three relatively recent additions to development Twitter worth noticing if you haven’t already, Tavneet Suri, Nava Ashraf, Seema Jayachandran. Here’s proof from just this week: There’s a new website devoted to making development research easily accessible, VoxDev.org. Editor Tavneet Suri says: Here is our vision: We want to bring cutting-edge research to the forefront of decision making – for policymakers, the private sector,...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. It’s a puzzle why more people don’t use long-acting reversible contraceptives like IUDs or hormone shots. Berk Ozler reports on qualitative findings from Cameroon about why adolescent girls don’t seem interested in them. A new working paper suggests that how refugees fare economically in the U.S. is heavily dependent on at what age they arrive, perhaps because learning English is easier if they come earlier. The authors estimate...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. “Why Poverty is Like a Disease” looks at epigenetics and how poverty interacts with one’s own biological development. It’s well written, by someone who describes what it was like growing up poor and how hard it was to escape. (h/t David Batcheck) Our World in Data asks “How Much Will it Cost to Mitigate Climate Change?” Some nice news via Dina Pomeranz: globally deaths from diarrheal disease fell by a third between 2005 and...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. An attempt to measure and rank the most effective ways to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere ranked educating girls and family planning (globally) above green energy. Fewer unplanned births means fewer carbon footprints. (h/t Osman Siddiqi) On Monday, President Trump expanded the “global gag rule” to mean no funding can go to any NGO that also discusses abortion with beneficiaries anywhere in their operations. This expansion grows its...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. The datasets above all have the same means, SD, and correlations explain Justin Matejka & George Fitzmaurice of Autodesk in a modern update of Anscombe’s Quartet. But the lesson is the same – always plot your stuff. (h/t everybody) Jobs postings: Summer jobs with Busara Center, full-year with Michael Clemens, and many at the IPA/J-PAL (and several other orgs) jobs portal. Podcasts: Tyler Cowen talks with Cardiff Garcia on FT...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Chris Blattman & Stefan Dercon have an op-ed in the New York Times, reporting on their study with IPA and the Ethiopian Development Research Institute. They randomly offered poor workers in Ethiopia who were applying for factory jobs the jobs they wanted or an alternative entrepreneurship opportunity. Turns out the jobs were pretty bad – most quit and those that stayed weren’t any better off than those who never god a job...