Tag Archives: links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Two podcast recommendations: NPR has a new podcast, Rough Translation, from former East Africa correspondent Gregory Warner (web, Apple). It looks at how questions we deal with here play out differently in other cultures. The first episode looks at how Brazil ended up with race tribunals to evaluate who was Black enough to qualify for affirmative action. The second looks at fake news planted by Russia in Ukraine. The fun...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. You might have heard that just giving the poor cash, no strings attached, is all the rage in the effective aid community. Some people have suggested that if organizations want to give (more expensive) in-kind aid (food, cattle), they should first show that it’s more effective than cash. Dev Patel just recirculated a relevant paper (summary here) from Cunha, De Giorgi, and Jayachandran, who tested giving cash vs. in-kind...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. You might have heard that just giving the poor cash, no strings attached, is all the rage in the effective aid community. Some people have suggested that if organizations want to give (more expensive) in-kind aid (food, cattle), they should first show that it’s more effective than cash. Dev Patel just recirculated a relevant paper (summary here) from Cunha, De Giorgi, and Jayachandran, who tested giving cash vs. in-kind food aid...

Jobs: NPR’s Planet Money is looking for someone who knows about econ to do shorter stories linked to the news of the day (explaining the econ of current issues in the news). Good communication/explainer skills but no previous journalism experience required. I know several of the people there and they’re all amazing, I can’t recommend them enough. (I would just caution, from experience, that journalism culture differs from academia. It moves fast and requires precision under hard deadlines...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Jobs: NPR’s Planet Money is looking for someone who knows about econ to do shorter stories linked to the news of the day (explaining the econ of current issues in the news). Good communication/explainer skills but no previous journalism experience required. I know several of the people there and they’re all amazing, I can’t recommend them enough. (I would just caution, from experience, that journalism culture differs from...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. This week’s Freakonomics episode, titled “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Money (But Were Afraid to Ask)” (Apple podcasts) features an all-star cast of Jack Bogle on not trying to beat the market, Annamaria Lusardi on teaching basic financial tips to NFL players, and Harold Pollack on his index card of financial heuristics. Readers of this blog are all financial whizzes but, you know, for your friends and stuff....

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. The summer ape blockbuster you’re been waiting for is here. In Science economists Seema Jayachandran, and Joost de Laat team up with  satellite researchers Eric Lambin, Charlotte Stanton, Robin Audy, and Nancy Thomas (with some help from IPA and Uganda’s Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust). They ran the first RCT showing that just paying farmers in Uganda a little bit not to cut down forest on their land where...

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. Above: Maintaining attention for a long interview is always a challenge Fake news is already disrupting Kenya’s election. Qualtrics, the research software company, did a randomized experiment testing the kinds of extra questions researchers embed in surveys to make sure respondents are paying attention and answering thoughtfully. They found including those questions earlier in a survey actually led to respondents performing...