Tag Archives: news

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action The animation above comes from a cool page of causal inference animations by Nick Huntington-Klein (h/t Alex Tabarrok), which go through, step-by-step with scatterplots, how different methods work. Alex was one of many who offered helpful tips for getting through undergrad econometrics. Call for papers for the Y-Rise conference Dec 15-21 on the science of scaling promising interventions. They have research networks looking at...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action A very cool job market paper and explanatory thread, from Ph.D. candidate Matthew Klein. He, Bradford L. Barham, and Yuexuan Wu, link women’s household bargaining power to malaria rates in Malawi. They find that a one standard deviation increase in a woman’s household bargaining power implies a 40% reduction in chances that anybody in the household contracts malaria. They caution their ability to infer why this works is limited...

(Photo via Flickr) Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action I realized after I posted it last week that it was my 200th links, which is a nice occasion to acknowledge and thank my colleague Cara Vu, who, despite being one of the busiest people I know, edits them and saves me from self-humiliation on a weekly basis. She catches between 8 and 200 mistakes in every one.And also thanks for reading. I really do appreciate the occasional emails, twitter shout outs, and...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Thanks for being patient with the intermittent links schedule over the summer, I expect to have some catch-up ones included over the next weeks. Congrats to Mauricio Romero, Justin Sandefur, and Wayne Sandholtz, on their forthcoming article in American Economic Review, (ungated) on the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program, a public-private partnership testing how a variety of private school operators compared to...

Guest post by by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Chris has been threatening it for a while but looks like he’s finally done it (click through to see the full thread and description of why his answer’s not what you might expect): Set your 2-year clock for my book: Why We Fight. Everything you need to know about why gangs, nations, and other groups go to war, and how to stop it. Just signed with editor Wendy Wolf @VikingBooks, an imprint @PenguinUSA! Huge credit to agent...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. The 26 artifacts, which include statutes and thrones looted by French troops during a military raid against the once powerful West African Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892, are among some of the 5,000 artifacts requested from France by Benin. And that’s just Benin, there are an estimated 90,000 looted African artifacts in France. A holy grail in economic development, and really all of business investment, is figuring out which small...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action J-PAL North America has released a pretty spiffy-looking toolkit for doing evaluations in North America, covering conceptual things like assessing feasibility as well as technical things like power calculations, with links to code and more resources (most of the info isn’t specific to North America).It’s been a big few weeks for open science:It is the policy of the American Economic Association to publish papers only if the data...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action India’s government is hiring behavioral scientists for a new nudge unit (h/t Neela Saldanha)Cancer researcher Peter Bach points out how Novartis used anchoring to set price expectations high for a new immunotherapy, making a 2 million dollar drug price (much higher than other life-saving treatments) sound reasonable years in advance by consistently referring to the new treatments in development as “million dollar therapies.” In...

WHO measles surveillance dataGuest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Thanks for being patient while the links were sleeping, expect some summer disruptions of schedule as wellMeasles cases are up 300% over last year with outbreaks in the U.S., Europe, The Philippines, Myanmar, and several African countries. I heard a PSA that adults vaccinated before a certain period (when the vaccine process changed) might no longer be immune. So I got checked and sure enough I wasn’t,...

Pick up your own 5-HTTLPR gene research summary shirt on etsy.Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action IPA’s looking for a Director of Poverty Measurement. In particular the job involves overseeing the Poverty Probability Index, a short, country-specific tool practitioners use to estimate poverty rates, and developing new non-monetary measures (requires strong quant background). Please share with anybody who might be interested.How the government of Odisha, one of...