Tag Archives: Research

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...

(Didn’t think I’d get a chance to use this again) Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Congratulations to Emi Nakamura, winner of the Clark medal. Noah Smith explains her work and why it’s rare for macroeconomists to win it.And congratulations to World Bank Chief Economist & Yale professor Penny Goldberg on her election to the National Academy of Sciences.A few years ago, the “Worm Wars” broke out when a team reanalyzed data from a classic finding on the benefits...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action A wonderful back and forth between David Evans and DFID Deputy Chief Economist Nick Lea, ostensibly about regressions, but to me resonated more broadly on methods. Papers seem to have to need the magical pixie dust of a regression to get accepted for publication, but is it the case that every problem in development is a nail waiting for a regression hammer? Lea wonders if methods are constraining the kinds of questions economists...

Couldn’t make it to Oxford to the CSAE conference? Better call Dave.Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action First, he’s back! David Evans, ensconced in his new digs at the Center for Global Development, brings us a roundup of over 275 papers from the Center for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) conference, in a fancy new expandable format indexed by topic. (Honestly it’s probably better than going to the conference to have someone review all those papers and give...

Need education outcomes explained in a more intuitive way? Better call Dave Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action A lovely tribute to Dave Evans, who’s been a boon to the field, and a prolific producer of public goods, from David McKenzie and his Development Impact Blog colleaguesI ran a quick search, and I’ve cited him about 50 times in my links It’s fitting that Dave’s final Dev Impact post is in one of his specialities, making research more understandable to...

Slide from Kaja Jasinska, who’s studying child neurodevelopment and reading in Côte d’Ivoire (link to conference video below)Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Berk Ozler counts the numbers of men vs. women asking questions during a seminar speaker’s talk, and guess how the ratio came out (it’s worth also checking out the discussion below, including a code of conduct being considered at one department). In a follow-up to his informational intervention, he found a...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action One of the videos shown by Green, et. al, for the study belowA nice piece in Vox about a study by Columbia’s Don Green, Anna Wilke, & Jasper Cooper with my colleagues at IPA in Uganda, using really nice, locally produced videos from the NGO Peripheral Vision International, shown along with popular U.S. movies, which reduced violence against women. Plain language summary of the research, full paper. One note, the route wasn’t...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action My IPA colleagues have a series of blog posts about our experience moving evidence into policy. The first lays out the org’s strategic ambition for what we plan on doing differently over the next several years. The second is on how to get non-research-oriented partners (like governments and NGOs) involved in the research process from the start to make sure they have ownership and the questions address their needs. The third is...