Tag Archives: Research

Pesticides are linked to negative health outcomes, but a causal relationship is difficult to establish due to nonrandom pesticide exposure. I use a peculiar ecological phenomenon, the mass emergence of cicadas in 13 and 17-year cycles across the eastern half of the US, to estimate the short and long-term impacts of pesticides. With a triple-difference setup that leverages the fact that cicadas only damage tree crops and not agricultural row crops, I show that insecticide use increases with...

I’ve read a lot of personal statements for PhD applications. I sat on admissions at UChicago, Columbia, and Yale, mostly in economics, political science, and public policy. Here’s the advice I’ve given my own students and research assistants to craft their statements. I give it because, sadly, I don’t find most statements helpful. This means they are not helping you, the applicant. As with all my advice posts, it’s important that students outside elite colleges get this information, so here...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A quick note, my posting frequency has slowed down in 2021, thanks for sticking with it. One reason has been that I’ve been co-authoring another set of links with my brilliant IPA colleagues, Luciana Debenedetti & Rachel Strohm, every other week focused on new research on COVID and social protection (this week’s is here). Among other, I think I also hit what I now realize was a quarantine burnout. If it’s helpful to anybody...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. My colleagues in the methods department at IPA have an RFP out for awards of up to $20,000 for studies to improve methods, generalizability, transparency and the like. Deadline Feb 28th. 26 co-authors published a paper using 16 samples of household surveys of 30,000 people in 9 countries to assess impact of last spring’s COVID disruptions. As you can imagine, it was grave, with losses of income, and hunger—including in...

The latest I’ve seen on the Uganda election is that ballot counting continues, I thought I saw police had disrupted counting at at least one location, and opposition candidate, singer Bobi Wine says the military has stationed themselves in and around his home without explanation. My boss, Annie Duflo, is profiled in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. Charles Kenny has a new paper and blog post out arguing aid would help the most people if it prioritized the poorest places first. He also...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Some student-created infographic examples from the Communicating Economics website.  Communicating Economics is a site with tools, tips, and videos of in-person college level lectures on, well, pretty much what the title says. It comes from the person behind Econ Films, whom I’ve worked with before and are very good at at what they do. A Belgian court has cleared the way for the remains of the first Prime Minister of an...

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 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...