Tag Archives: news

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action This weekend I’m planning on reading this crazy-looking story about the Ocean’s 11 team that tricked the government of Angola into sending $500 Million to an accountant’s front office in London and how they were caught (h/t Ken Opalo)

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. I’ve been really enjoying the Vox and IRC collaboration podcast Displaced (Apple). Some highlights for me were Rachel Glennerster (who had an amazing response to the Guardian op-ed on RCTs), Alix Zwane, Owen Barder, and Stefan Dercon. I think I pinpointed one reason it feels so informative – the hosts have clearly read up on the topic, and the way they ask questions gives you all the background you need to get right into a really...

Labor Economist Mary Daly (above) is the incoming President and CEO of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. She has a pretty unconventional background (if I remember, she dropped out of high school). You can hear her explain the whole story and how she got interested in economics on the St. Louis Fed Women in Economics podcast. (Apple).Brookings has a fellowship for researchers or NGO leaders from developing countries (particularly Francophone West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Pacific...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Field researchers in Uganda strategize before going out to track down cash grant recipients nine years laterIt’s been a big week for cash, with two studies out on cash transfers based on data from my IPA colleagues:Craig McIntosh and Andy Zeitlin worked with IPA, USAID, Catholic Relief Services, and GiveDirectly in Rwanda to compare a standard WASH (water/sanitation/hygiene) and nutrition program to cash. You can read the...

The rest of the Jack Ryan pilot is 45 minutes of talking about clustering standard errors David McKenzie has a nice post and discussion on descriptive studies in development. In his back and forth with Lant in the comments he mentions the count of how many development econ studies in 14 journals in 2015 were RCTs (9.7%). Google introduced a data set search, which trawls for publicly available data sets, similarly to how Google Scholar works. Here they describe how it works and how to...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. This blog’s landlord, Chris Blattman, was on the Economic Rockstar podcast talking about Crime, Cocaine, Chicago Gangs, and the Colombia Mafia. (iTunes) And if you liked those projects, IPA has a job posting to work on projects like those with Chris and others in Colombia. This was fun – the Development Aid Project Jargon-ator is supposed to come up with nonsense development project titles, but so far all of mine sound pretty...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Snot corn! That’s crop scientist Sarah Taber’s nickname for the variety of maize native Mexicans cultivated that allowed it to grow very high in very poor soil. According to a genetic sequencing published by UC Davis researchers, the secret is in the mucus-like goop around roots that are out in the open. The bacteria in the goop allow the plant to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, effectively fertilizing itself from the air....

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. If you can get past me at the beginning, this Planet Money episode The Poop Cartels (Apple/iTunes link), I think shows the power of good econ theory put into practice. Molly Lipscomb of the University of Virginia explains how she, with Laura Schechter, and a big research team in Senegal tried to introduce what some people have also called the “Uber for Poop.” Peter Biar Ajak is a former Sudanese “lost boy” who went on to train...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. My colleague Rebecca Rouse guest edits today’s faiV newsletter from NYU’s Financial Access Initiative (you can subscribe for a weekly dose of financial inclusion news). Spectacular job opportunity from the International Rescue Committee working with NYU and Sesame Workshop, leading M&E on their MacArthur $100 Million-winning project to help war-affected kids. Alaka Holla picks up the question of whether we should give up on...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Petronia (above), an online course and game from the National Resource Governance Institute, lets users run a fictional country where oil is discovered to see if they can avoid the resource curse. (h/t David Batcheck) From the Stata journal– A new command, baselinetable, creates handy summary stats tables for your baseline reports to make sharing your findings much easier. It exports to Stata, Excel, CSV, etc to make it really...