Tag Archives: news

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. There’s a lot of basic social science documenting humanity’s flaws, biases, and injustices, but less on fixes. The cover of the new issue of Science today features Salma Mousa’s paper using an experiment in post-ISIS Iraq to promote reconciliation between persecuted Christians and their Muslim neighbors (plain language summary here). Using contact theory, she randomly assigned Muslim players to some teams in a Christian soccer...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Claudia Goldin charts a century of women in the workforce I’ve heard these days in medicine there’s a glut of papers that are all essentially “[thing I was doing already] + in the time of COVID,” which seems like is true of all fields now. The German Development Institute for Evaluation (DEval) has a helpful roundup of several useful new hubs for evidence, research, and methodology resources for dev/social science. A few weeks ago...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Cool panel on Wednesday, now that schools have gone remote, how to assess remotely if kids are learning. And another on Thursday including Anne Karing of Princeton, Jonathan Robinson from UC Santa Cruz, presenting new data on covid impacts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Malawi University of Cape Town economist Grieve Chelwa has been critical of RCTs in the past so my colleague and were braced for his online discussion at Africa...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Professor Lisa Cook explains that black and white inventors put in equivalent numbers of patent applications once in 1899, and never again.  First, a great webinar by Professor Lisa Cook, former economic advisor to President Obama, among many other accomplishments, on how lynchings, violence, and discrimination caused African-American inventions (measured by patent applications) to peak in 1899 and never recover. Here’s the video...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Stanford Political Scientist Hakeem Jefferson hosted a great conversation with a number of scholars on race and the criminal justice system [embedded content] The readings mentioned are assembled in this Dropbox folder and thread, and the Stanford Daily summarized the conversation. A couple of points that jumped out at me were what counts as research/evidence in academic research circles (it seems common for scholars of the black...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Coronavirus patient, comedian Noam Shuster, found herself at the center of an accidental social experiment profiled on the Rough Translation podcast My colleague Kate Glynn-Broderick writes today with an example of how her existing project in Bangladesh, exploring gender gaps in access to mobile money and banking is quickly pivoting to COVID-19, as Bangladesh’s government plans to use those same platforms to distribute social...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Last week I mentioned the new COVID research RECOVR hub, which was still in development. This week it’s been launched officially, to help development researchers share information about ongoing studies, survey instruments, and funding opportunities. If you are doing related work, please share or have a look at what other researchers are doing so we can build on one another’s work. A great initiative from the Busara Center, “Give...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action First some good news – congratulations to development economist and dewormer Ted Miguel, social psychologist of diversity and justice Jennifer Richeson, gynecologist and Nobel laureate, Denis Mukwege of the DRC, and the other newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For researchers working on (or interested in working on COVID in low- and middle-income countries): to facilitate collaboration, with...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Remember to fill out your U.S. Census form if you got a mailing! Of course accurate counts are important for apportioning leadership and federal resources, but more importantly (as someone else pointed out) so that researchers 80 years from now looking at historical trends won’t pull out their hair in frustration of the lost 2020 census data the same way ones today do about the 1890 census data fire. The Dev Impact blog had a pair...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Thanks for being patient while the links were on hiatus, we’re back! COVID-19 is obviously on everybody’s mind. For the dev crowd, let’s remember that right now travel from US/Europe to the Southern hemisphere might spread the disease to vulnerable places with much weaker health systems.I apologize for not having it handy, but there was a good thread about how the mental model of the poor countries being the source of diseases may...