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Channel: economics – Chris Blattman

IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Agriculture in Kenya

 

I know this week for many of us it’s been hard to pay attention to what else has been going on in the world, what with the release of Stata 15 and all, but I’ll try to help with some stuff you may have missed:

  • The World Bank’s Hedy Sladovich &Emanuela Galasso put together several very accessibly written one-paragraph summaries of recent findings on what works in early childhood development.
    • It pairs nicely with this (mostly Western-based) review from 10 researchers on what works in pre-K. If you’re busy, skip to the last page for the consensus statement.  (Both via David Evans)
  • But if you’re more into land and agriculture, you might prefer Markus Goldstein, Niklas Buehren and Muthoni Ngatia’s one-sentence summaries of 45 recent conference presentations on African agriculture.
  • A bunch of big name authors find returns to nudges for governments are generally pretty high, though they vary (helpfully, the authors compare different types of nudges in the same category so you can see the variance). It’s important to know that while the effects aren’t usually huge, they’re worthwhile because they’re so cheap (such as switching a default option in an existing program or sending a differently worded message), as they note:

Because traditional interventions are intended to change behavior by altering the cost-benefit calculation that individuals undertake when focusing on a particular decision, these interventions face the challenge that individuals’ ability (and desire) to engage high-level cognitive capacities is often limited (Shah, Mullainathan, & Shafir, 2012).  Nudges, by contrast, can succeed because they account for individuals’ intuitions, emotions, and automatic decision-making processes. These processes can be triggered or enlisted with simple cues and subtle changes to the choice environment, so nudges can be effective yet cheap, generating high impact per dollar spent.

And AreMenTalkingTooMuch.com is a handy timer you can use in meetings:

AreMenTalkingTooMuch

 

 

 

 

 

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Honesty Captcha3

  • In a clever online nudging experiment, 627,000 online taxpayers in Guatemala were given one of five different kinds of honesty messages, reminders about public goods, or legal warnings in a captcha. But none of the messages had any effect on taxes paid.
  • Some unexpected side effects of antimalarial insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs):

We show that ITNs reduced all-cause child mortality, but surprisingly increased total fertility rates in spite of reduced desire for children and increased contraceptive use. We explain this paradox by showing evidence for an unexpected increase in fecundity and sexual activity due to the better health environment after the ITN distribution. (h/t Charles Kenny)

 

  • If you want to work with Chris Blattman and a bunch of other great researchers, apply to lead IPA’s Colombia and Dominican Republic Office.
  • After listening to the latest Freakonomics podcast on managed vs. index funds, a listener came up with this simulation/slider you can show your friends to explain to them how management fees are killing their retirement savings.
  • The National Science Foundation has a big new report on what happens to new Ph.D.s. While the overall number of doctorates awarded has grown, the percentage with definite plans after they graduate has been shrinking in recent years:

Postgraduate Plans

  • Kenya has declared Kenyan-born Asians (e.g. Kenyans of Indian and other descent who’ve been in the country for generations) an official Kenyan tribe. But it’s not clear if that’s really a good sign.
  • Reason to test policies first #5,692: Economist Jennifer Doleac explains in Quartz what happens when well-intentioned states banned employers from asking applicants about criminal records. Employers hired fewer minority applicants in general (presumably increasing discriminating on more observable markers). It also doesn’t help the applicants with criminal records.

Every summer, the National Bureau of Economic Research conducts its own clever behavioral economics experiment to see if they can get top economists excited over reducing the price of readily available trinkets from a nominal fee to free. Let’s check in and see how it’s going this year:

 

 

Nice twist NBER!

 

 

And Leah’s survey got 100 responses

Can’t wait for the paper, NBER! (Though Dina might have contaminated the study design.)  Apparently other stuff went on also, but you can get links to the live tweet threads from Damon here.

And finally this helpful reminder (from Jennfier Doleac again) for summer travelers (click through for the reply):

 

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

EconLife

  • Two podcast recommendations:
    • NPR has a new podcast, Rough Translation, from former East Africa correspondent Gregory Warner (web, Apple). It looks at how questions we deal with here play out differently in other cultures. The first episode looks at how Brazil ended up with race tribunals to evaluate who was Black enough to qualify for affirmative action. The second looks at fake news planted by Russia in Ukraine.
    • The fun “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” podcast recently had a behavioral science all-star cast with Dean Karlan, George Loewenstein, Katy Milkman and a  gang of others (Web: Episode 24 “Behavior Change: Ultra Egghead Edition,” or Apple)
  • For economists (but probably useful for other academics as well), there will be a twitter panel discussion on balancing the professional part of your life with the rest on Wednesday, September 6th at 9PM EDT, dinnertime Pacific. You don’t have to be live to participate though; tweet your questions in advance with the #EconLife hashtag and the panel will answer.
  • A nice simulator complete with cartoons where you can play econ trust games. You can try different strategies to watch how outcomes change (and then set it to work simulating repeated play using different strategies). h/t Osman Siddiqi
  • How many social programs work? Depending on how you count, 60-80% of published evaluations don’t find a significant effect, but remember that published evaluations are not a representative sample of all social programs.
  • Google Earth is giving tours of indigenous and traditional homes around the world.
  • The Secret Economic Lives of Animals. Increasing numbers of species have been found to vary exchange rates for services (like wasps offering nesting space for childcare), based on changes in local supply and demand.
  • Two short and interesting econ lessons:
    • How the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff, in which the government ignored the warnings of over a thousand economists, sparked a global trade war which exacerbated the great depression. It all started with a move to protect the Mormon Church’s interest in sugar beets. Along the way they explain why trade protectionism is politically popular, even though it’s ultimately harmful to everybody.
    • How Pigouvian taxes work, in which a government taxes something that hurts others, allowing the parties involved to figure out how to minimize it, like a carbon tax.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

RedCrossPamphlet

A Red Cross pamphlet from WWI slogan (at the bottom): “Millions for Relief, but Not One Cent for Administration”

  • In a surprise ruling a few hours ago the Kenyan Supreme Court voided the outcome of the recent election, calling for a new one within 60 days. The Nairobi stock market dropped 10 percent right away, triggering a brief halt in trading. Follow Ken Opalo for the latest (and just in general).
  • Here’s one way to cut through IRB paperwork. Investor Peter Thiel had 17 patients flown to St. Kitts to inject them with an experimental herpes drug which couldn’t get funding or IRB approval in the United States. So next time the IRB does’t approve some of your survey questions, consider flying the village to the Caribbean to ask them there.
  • If you hadn’t heard about it yet, ProPublica and NPR some time ago did stories on the American Red Cross’ repeated failures and lack of financial transparency in disaster responses over the years. They included driving empty trucks around during Superstorm Sandy for news crews to film, and raising half a billion dollars for Haiti rebuilding, but only building 6 homes. You can get the history here, but I did not realize that 71% of their revenue is from for-profit blood services. That business has been squeezed in recent years by lowered demand, leading them to cut back on disaster staff.
  • Development Impact blog links are back from vacation!
  • Over at the Center for Global Development, an assessment of the state of health evaluations. In a blog postbrief, & full paper, Raifman, Lam, Keller, Radunsky & Savedoff describe finding 299 evaluations in the health sector and grading 37 of them in depth for quality. Results were disappointing.
  • The new Rough Translation podcast from NPR went to the DRC to look into what happened when NGOs started showing up looking to help survivors of highly publicized mass rapes. It created a cottage industry (they actually have a phrase that translates into that), of villages finding women to say they were raped to get the aid. But the show looks a little deeper with the journalist who originally investigated it into the morals of the issue. The NGOs aren’t going to question the veracity of a victim’s story, and both the NGOs and people there are afraid that if it comes out that the rape stories aren’t true, it will cut off the flow of aid to people who need it.
  • Kremer and Rao slides on behavioral economics in development are here if you missed them.

The economics to sociology phrasebook is fun (h/t Chris):

economics-sociology-phrasebook

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Screen Shot 2017-09-08 at 10.43.02 AM

  • Results of a long-awaited and somewhat controversial evaluation of a public-private partnership to manage schools in Liberia were released yesterday by IPA and The Center for Global Development:
    • With their education system in pretty bad shape, the Liberian government piloted the Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) program, which contracted out day-to-day management of some government schools to a mix of operators, non-profit and private, foreign and local. The government still owns the physical schools, the teachers are required to come from the same pool of government-employed teachers, and still have to teach the government-mandated curriculum, but within those parameters, the school operators have broad flexibility. Fortunately, the government invited researchers to randomize which schools were put under private operation, so it could be studied.
    • Preliminary results from the first year showed that students at PSL schools spent twice as much time learning, and students learned on average about 60 percent more than in the public schools, but it was very expensive. While the government budgeted about $100 per pupil for PSL schools (already twice what’s spent on public schools), the outside orgs brought their own funding, adding an extra $57 to $663 (or $1,052, depending on which numbers you use) per student.
    • The biggest operator spent the most and got the among the highest learning gains, but also removed more than half of their teachers and a number of their students (presumably, sending them back out into the traditional public schools).
    • The research team concludes that this may be a way to get learning up in an individual school, but probably not sustainable as a national program without significant changes.
    • In contrast, J-PAL reviewed evidence from other countries showing similar learning gains at much lower cost from a variety of other interventions. (With the caveat that they haven’t been tested in Liberia.)
    • Read more on the blogshort brief, or full working paper from Romero, Sandefur, and Sandholtz, or this thoughtful tweetstorm analysis from Abhijeet Singh.  It’s Mauricio Romero’s job market paper, so if you want to hear more, he’s probably happy to come talk about it.
  • J-PAL Executive Director and new Chief Economist for the UK aid agency DFID, Rachel Glennerster, with Claire Walsh, wrote a blog post about something that makes researchers break out in a cold sweat. What if you ask something people have always asked about using standard questions (in this case, womens’ empowerment), but also ask in a slightly different, more specific way, and find you get a very different answer?
  • Highlights via Damon Jones from this week’s twitter panel on balancing econ professional life with the rest of it. See the full discussion by searching twitter for the #EconLife hashtag.
  • Rebecca Thornton has put together a number of resources on gender and economics.
  • Cash is all the rage in the development and aid community. Parts of India are transitioning from subsidizing food for the poor to depositing cash directly into their bank accounts. But there have been some problems with the rollout, particularly with it not making it into people’s accounts, or it being difficult for recipients to access the accounts. Despite this, recipients say they still prefer the cash, which offers them flexibility in how much and what kinds of food they can buy.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Queen of Katwe Movie Still

Madina Nalwanga as chess champion Phiona Mutesi in the film Queen of Katwe.
Photo: Edward Echwalu/Disney

  • Recognizing that an increasing amount of development policy is being done in developing countries, the prominent British NGO Oxfam is moving its headquarters from the UK to Nairobi.
  • There’s some evidence that being exposed to relatable role models can improve performance in school or at work. A newly-published RCT compared the exam scores of secondary school students in Uganda who viewed Queen of Katwe, a movie about a girl from a low-income community in Uganda who becomes a chess champion, to those who viewed a placebo movie. The students who watched Queen of Katwe were more likely to pass their national exams than those who did not, and the effects were especially large for girls and students who had performed poorly on the exams in the past. The working paper is available here.
  • The Kenyan Supreme Court delivered its full ruling nullifying last month’s election, citing concerns over the accuracy of the results.
  • There’s a free online course starting next week on the science of early childhood development from an international development perspective, including what programs are effective for early childhood.
  • A report from a U.S. government agency found that over the past decade, the government made $63 billion more in tax revenue from refugees than the refugees cost the government. The report was mandated by the president in March, but the administration chose not to release it when the findings were revealed in July (The New York Times obtained a draft copy).
    • Over at the Center for Global Development, economist Michael Clemens reviews the research on the economic impacts of wealthy countries accepting refugees.

Links will be on a break for the next couple of weeks—we’ll see you back here in October.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Screen Shot 2017-12-15 at 12.34.41 PM

  • First a word from my sponsor – IPA’s kind enough to let me use some time writing these links up almost every week for the last 2.5 years, but there’s no such thing as a free link. If you’d go to www.poverty-action.org/donate and help us make our end-of-year budget I’d appreciate it.
    • And, I’ll draw up a few winners (at random of course) for your choice of a) a tote bag from Ghana (long story), b) a very cheap lunch with some of our staff in New York or c) My 84-page doc of links I didn’t have room to post. Let us know your preference in the donation form comments box.
  • Via Claudia Sahm, a great interview from the Minneapolis Fed with Princeton economist Anne Case (also scroll back to April & May in the Financial Times Alphachat podcast to hear a great interview (iTunes) and interesting bonus chat (iTunes) about her career and reacting to blogs critiquing of her work).
  • We don’t often hear the stories behind the data that goes into papers, but the enumerators in the field work really hard. Here’s one story about an enumerator tracking down a participant from one of Chris’ studies in Uganda, 9 years later.
  • I recently mentioned profs might want to check their letters of recommendation for  gender biased phrasing (here). A tech company is doing something similar for job posting language:

    Textio found certain phrases such as “disciplined” and “tackle,” used more often by Netflix and Google, respectively, statistically correlated to a more male-dominated applicant pool. Netflix didn’t respond to a request for comment and Google declined to comment.

    Atlassian Corp. , a maker of workplace collaboration tools and a Textio client, said that after it overhauled the language in its job postings, women accounted for 57% of the class of new-graduate hires working in engineering, product management and design in 2017, compared with 10% two years ago before the language changes.*

  • In the wake of the increasing revelations of #MeToo in academia, the Women In  Economics at Berkeley blog interviewed four men figuring out how to be better allies to their classmates and colleagues.
  • Most development aid doesn’t go to the neediest parts of countries, Ryan Briggs writes. Aid projects tend to cluster in the better-off and urban areas, which may be simply because it’s harder to get to the more rural impoverished places that need it more.
  • Psychologists are trying to solve the replicability problem with a collaboration of 183 labs on six continents, who’ll volunteer to run the same study simultaneously (not all labs will run all studies).
  • People’s nominations for worst or weirdest cryptocurrency promotions. (h/t David Batcheck)

PS – related to the ask above, you can also use our Amazon Smile link for shopping, to donate a small portion to us (the Smile Always chrome extension will remember to redirect you there).

 

And, from Reddit/DataIsBeautiful, lighting strikes follow the path of shipping lanes (exhaust from ships increases likelihood and intensity of thunder storms). (h/t Max Galka)

Lighting Strike over shipping lanes

* Yes I realize it’s a before-and-after story.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

A big thanks to all the folks who’ve donated to IPA’s anti-poverty work before the year end (you can also donate through Dean Karlan’s Facebook fundraiser through tomorrow, credit to his brave daughter on that one.)

  • Thirteen prominent economists offer their favorite econ papers of the year, but the paper making a splash this week is from Melissa Dell and Pablo Querubin, comparing two approaches to combatting insurgency during the Vietnam War. They exploit the fact that the U.S. Army and Marines had authority over strategy in different parts of the country and took different approaches. While the Army used an overwhelming bombing campaign, the Marines took a “hearts and minds” approach, embedding troops in villages for security and conducting development projects. They conclude the bombing increased the insurgency and worsened attitudes towards the U.S., compared to the hearts and minds approach. Or as someone commented, it turns out you can’t bomb somebody into liking you.
    • Their method for finding similar villages (that were either targeted for bombing or not) to compare got a standing ovation at an NBER talk:

[Newly] Declassified Air Force histories document that one of the factors used in allocating weekly preplanned bombing missions was hamlet security (Project CHECO 1969). A Bayesian algorithm combined data from 169 questions on security, political, and economic characteristics into a single hamlet security rating. The output ranged continuously from 1 to 5 but was rounded to the nearest whole number before being printed from the mainframe computer.

The study estimates the causal impacts of overwhelming firepower by comparing places just below and above the rounding thresholds, with being below the threshold used as an instrument for bombing.

  • While many people have advocated for framing predictions about the future in terms of probabilities, David Leonhardt uses a Kahneman story to explain that most people have difficulty thinking probabilistically, and usually just round up or down to a yes or no. Instead he suggests that stories explaining why things might plausibly turn out one way or the other could work better. Similarly, earlier this year Robert Shiller wrote that economists, lost in numbers, have failed to appreciate the human instinct for storytelling. He went through newspapers before and after the great depression to gauge sentiment at the time, and concludes that economists rarely account for the power of people’s mental narratives to drive economic cycles. But he suggests this is an area where economists might learn something from the humanities.
  • I mentioned a few weeks ago that the U.N. was sending a special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights on a tour examining extreme poverty in the U.S. His observations on terrible conditions for the poor in the U.S. were pretty stunning. But he also concludes that one reason for America’s lack of action in the face of such suffering, or even for implementing policies that make poverty worse, is the stories other Americans tell themselves about the poor:

He found that stereotypes serve to undermine the poor — and are used to justify not coming to their aid. “So the rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic and the drivers of economic success. The poor, on the other hand, are wasters, losers and scammers,” Alston told NPR. As a result, he says, many people believe that “money spent on welfare is money down the drain. Money devoted to the rich is a sound investment.”
He spoke to politicians and political appointees who were “completely sold on the narrative of such scammers sitting on comfortable sofas, watching color TVs, while surfing on their smartphones, all paid for by welfare.”
But Alston says he met people working full time at chain stores who needed food stamps because they couldn’t survive on their wages.

  • In his job market paper NYU’s Kevin Munger describes a randomized trial where he used twitter bots/fake accounts to remind uncivil people to be nicer in political discourse, and it worked. So maybe there’s hope for humanity?
  • Scientists, you’ve been caught. Adding new information to Wikipedia entries led to that new information being cited more in the scientific literature.
    • It also makes me look with more interest at the trial Chris Blattman did at the request of Wikipedia, using his course to have students write or improve Wikipedia articles.
  • One of the better cryptocurrency efforts I’ve seen: you can donate your extra CPU cycles to mine cryptocurrency for the Bronx Bail Fund. (Caveat: I haven’t tried or vetted it yet, and yes I know about the electricity), h/t Colin Rust.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Preregistration stops medications from working

 

  • Tyler Cowen interviewed Chris Blattman and in typical Cowen fashion came prepared – I had to slow down my usual podcast playback speed to keep up. Topics Included what Chris learned from his first job at a higher class Canadian KFC, interviewing child soldiers, causes of the Peloponnesian Wars, why he’d rather transfer accountants to poor countries than cash, and how he tries to get inside a problem that other people haven’t really thought about yet.
  • One of my favorite economists and voices for econ in public policy, Jennifer Doleac, with Anita Mukherjee published a working paper suggesting there may be unintended consequences of states passing laws allowing access to Naloxone (the anti-opioid overdose drug). They suggested the laws were associated with more ER visits, and if anything more opioid deaths, and that perhaps there was a moral hazard of making treatment available. Then, as Olga Khazan describes in The Atlantic, the world jumped down their throats, particularly those in public health and others involved in the opioid treatment world. Things got uncivil at times, accusations of not knowing anything about the field and confusing correlation with causation, what’s this whole “working paper” thing – is it just somebody’s Word doc?, etc. But a lot of the disagreement seems to stem from misunderstandings across disciplines in what counts for evidence.
    • Political scientist Corrine McConnaughy does a service here explaining why people often see economists as tone deaf, parachuting into a field full of people who’ve spent careers studying one topic and making broad generalizations of how the world works. She cites an interesting JEP paper “The Superiority of Economics” about the implicit pecking order within social sciences.
  • A veteran NPR investigative journalist was dismissed from NPR after sexual harassment allegations, but three organizations representing former Peace Corps volunteers and others want NPR to release the story he was working on, about the potentially very dangerous side effects of commonly-prescribed anti-malarial drugs.
  • A really nice interview with Global Innovation Fund CEO Alix Zwane by David McKenzie about non-professor jobs with an econ Ph.D. Read to the end for a couple of nice tips at the end about practicing self-care in graduate school and developing the skills to manage others.
  • Above – amazingly drug effectiveness went down (proportion of positive results published dropped from 57% to 8%) after clinical trials were required to preregister (h/t Josh Kalla & Rachael Meager). To combat publication bias, the Journal of Development Economics will now try accepting studies for publication before they’re run. Though David points out a political science journal regretted it.

And  Bloomberg’s Iain Marlow points out, Indian and Pakistani diplomatic spats have devolved to high school level:

This comment came, even as it came to light that tension has been brewing between the two sides for a couple of months — one of the incidents involved the doorbell of the Indian deputy High Commissioner J P Singh being rung at 3 am. Since the Indian side felt that this was done by Pakistan’s security agencies, the Pakistan deputy high commissioner Syed Haider Shah’s door bell was also rung at 3 am in next few days.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Detecting soldiers registering as new voters in Cambodia from the gender distribution.

  • Take a few minutes to read the latest newsletter from the CSWEP, the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. In particular, the opening harrowing account from economist and law professor Jennifer Bennett Shinall on being sexually assaulted by a more senior colleague on an airplane, and on page 5, the anonymous descriptions from CSWEP members that document the range of everyday harassment that women in the field experience.
    • Lest you think it’s only a problem of junior faculty, read this encounter Sue Dynarski had with a faculty member when she was giving a named lecture.
    • On a much more inspiring note is this series of three short but great podcasts from the St. Louis Fed on women in economics. They’re with Mary Daly, who went from high school dropout to research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco; Ellen Zentner, chief economist at Morgan Stanley; and Claudia Sahm, of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
      • Some takeaways: Each had a figure who got them really excited about economics, usually a teacher at a small school (if you’re ever down on teaching, think about the potentially great future contributors in the class).
      • Claudia Sahm (I believe), pointed out that she didn’t want the recent public talk of sexual harassment in the field to have the paradoxical effect of discouraging women from choosing the field.
      • Another takeaway was that to address the numbers of women in the field, you have to address the pipeline of women choosing the field and then not attriting along the way. For them, mentorship played an important role.
        • A similar point about the corporate world came up in the very good Freakonomics episode about the Glass Cliff, the phenomenon of women being chosen as CEOs once a company is already in trouble, making it more likely they’ll be blamed for the company’s failure. Ellen Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo, and Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo CEO point out at the end, that you can lament about lack of women CEOs, but that you won’t get women CEOs without women as Senior Vice Presidents to choose from, and so on, back down the line.
  • Another great conversation was Ezra Klein talking with Melinda Gates (Apple, RSS) about lots of great stuff (including the pipeline of women going into tech and STEM fields). She goes into a lot of great things she sees from her vantage point coming for global poverty and development, but Klein thankfully starts off with the hard-hitting question we all wanted to know: Where did Comic Sans come from?
  • Above, in advance of elections Cambodia sends soldiers out to different regions to register as voters there and boost the ruling party’s votes. It’s detectable statistically by the timing of new voter registrations and gender skew among registered voters. (via Hannes Hemker)
  • The Millennium Villages retrospective (non-randomized) endline evaluation is out.
  • Texas maternal mortality statistics were improperly skewed by a bad drop-down menu design.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • Chris found this above, (from a 2016 post) anthropologist Jennifer Esperanza got annoyed at how her field’s textbooks always had exotic cover images, when anthropology is really the study of all humanity. “‘Why can’t there be images of, for example, a group of white American women eating salads, on the cover?,’ she asked.” Dori Tunstall and Julie Hill took up the challenge of putting white people on the covers of anthro textbooks:
  • Rachel Strohm writes movingly and compellingly about her experience with depression in academia. If you’re around grad students, you probably know someone who’s quietly dealing with depression or anxiety, and Rachel explains why academia seems to bring those to the forefront. Also, you probably know someone outside academia dealing with depression. Actor Wil Wheaton explains what it was like to be an adolescent celebrity trying to hide his chronic depression and anxiety, and how once in his 20’s in the middle of the night he drove to his sister’s house to sleep on her floor, the only thing that had helped when they were kids.
    • The great irony of course is that people generally don’t talk about it, so many people go through it alone.
  • After years of work expanding access to bank accounts, and discussions of particular outreach to women, a poll of 150,000 people in 144 countries shows the gender gap in bank account ownership is the same seven percentage points as it was in 2011 when the poll first started. In high-income countries the gap is minimal or zero, while in low- and middle-income countries it can be 30 percentage points.
  • How does champion reader David Evans retain the information from all the economics, fiction, history, audiobooks, and graphic novels he reads? He takes notes along the way in Evernote, copying the best insights from Amazon’s “look inside” feature, and also writes reviews on his blog to remember the main takeaways.
  • Uganda’s education minister rejected a proposed sexual education curriculum as “recruitment grounds for homosexuality and other perversions.” Her proposed replacement will focus on abstinence and faithfulness in marriage. Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer’s 7-year study of neighboring Kenya’s abstinence-focused program found it did not reduce pregnancy or STIs, though the results were a little more complex when it was combined with free school uniforms for girls (effectively reducing their cost of education).
  • Greg Rosalsky interviews Harvard’s David Laibson for an article about Econ 101 textbooks. As the field of economics has evolved in recent decades, the most popular textbooks, Samuelson, Mankiw, etc., still essentially teach a largely theoretical classical model, tacking on behavioral and other paradigm shifts as updates at the end of chapters or in callout boxes. This means that the version of econ taught, one based on elegant imaginary lands of universal information, perfectly functioning markets, and selfishness enhancing everybody’s long-run welfare doesn’t reflect how most economists think or practice today. It’s the intellectual equivalent of putting an attractive, but outdated picture on economics’ online dating profile that doesn’t show the field as it really is, which means most policymakers’ understanding of economics is largely fictional.
    • Personally though, all of my work rests on Samuelson
  • Also read this thread from Beatrice Cherrier on how Samuelson’s attitudes towards women changed over the course of his career. And Cherrier’s note on his wife, Marion Crawford Samuelson, a gifted mathematical economist who published one paper and retired after having their first child. In her obituary, Paul Samuelson described her work as foundational to the Nobel Prize he received. Be sure to follow Beatrice for more amazing stories on the history of the field.

 

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

A slight, shy, balding, 49-year-old when the 1980 Nobel was announced, Cronin was relieved when the university sent Larry Arbeiter to his home at 7 a.m. to help him handle the deluge of requests for press interviews. Arbeiter, a writer in the university’s press office, suggested that Cronin satisfy all the interview requests at once by holding a 10 a.m. news conference.
”Oh,” Cronin insisted, ”I can’t do it then. I’ve got a 10 o’clock class this morning.”
With a good reporter’s instinct, Arbeiter asked what course Cronin was teaching, thinking of news photos of the newly minted Nobelist lecturing to his awed and adoring students.
”No, no,” Cronin told Arbeiter, ”I’m not teaching a course, I’m taking Chandrasekhar’s graduate course on the theory of relativity.”

  • A few days after the Nobel, Romer spoke to NYU graduate students, according to Emma van Inwegen, he spent about half the time talking to them about his research: 
  • Every year the World Bank releases its World Development Report, taking stock of one aspect of development, diving into what we know, and looking to what might be ahead. This year’s is out and the theme is The Changing Nature of Work. If wealthy countries have already transitioned to digital economies, what does that mean for countries with large populations of farmers and unemployed, and that are still working on building industrial sectors? 
  • The National Academies has just put out their comprehensive review and update on the science of learning: How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures. (The II refers to an update of the first in 1999). Note that it’s free to read online or download a PDF.
  • The popular photo & personal storytelling project Humans of New York (Facebook, & Instagram) has been in Nigeria and Ghana profiling people’s stories. One that jumped out at me was Ghanaian Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang. He got a Ph.D. in West Virginia, but afterwards faced with the decision to stay in the U.S. where job prospects were better or return to Ghana, he decided to go back so that his child wouldn’t have to grow up experiencing the racism he saw here (though he jumped in to add that he enjoyed living in both places).
  • A reminder for profs that first generation college students might not realize they can ask for help in extenuating circumstances, like extensions on work. It’s helpful to explicitly say it.
  • And on the grad level Shelly Lundberg explains that grad students from minority backgrounds or untraditional paths might not realize the unspoken things about grad school that one needs to know (like how to choose an advisor), and what do to about it. She makes some helpful recommendations about how faculty and fellow students can make sure everybody’s successful. 
  • My vague impression is that the health community has done a better job responding to more recent outbreaks of Ebola, but now it’s appeared in a conflict zone in the DRC, and traditional public health approaches of contact tracing and using the new vaccine to immunize contacts of the infected, are much more difficult to accomplish in those circumstances.
  • Previews of AER: Insights are up, including lots of names you’ll recognize, including Karlan, Mullainathan, and Roth who look at debt traps in India and the Philippines. Part of being poor is being stuck in cycles of debt, but if their high-interest debts are paid off for them, does eliminating that drag help them stay debt-free? Unfortunately, most were back in debt in six weeks, and one to two years later, those who’d had their debt paid off were borrowing at the same rates as those in a comparison group who hadn’t had any intervention.
  • Karthik Muralidharan and Paul Niehaus have a nice audio interview with VoxDev about their Experimentation at Scale paper and the differences between a typically relatively small RCT and effects when talking about big (say, national level), changes.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest Post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

  • Hope everybody’s off to a great new year, and good luck to all the job candidates interviewing at ASSA. Also, remember from the last links that Ben Casselman, who’s been co-reporting on sexual harassment in economics for the New York Times, is there and happy to meet confidentially with anybody who wants to tell him about their experience. If you’re not on twitter, feel free to email me and I’ll put you in touch with him (confidentially of course).
  • At the Data Colada blog Uri Simonsohn realizes that publishing articles with links online (such as to news articles) is problematic as links die or change over time. He reviewed links in his articles since 2005 and found over half didn’t work anymore, and recommends a simple fix: Instead of the direct URL, link to the Internet Archive version of it.
  • Preanalysis plans (PAPs), where you specify your analysis before you see the data, can be a bit controversial. Some say a PAP ties your hands and prevents you from exploring things you might only find out about later. Psychologist and open science advocate Sanjay Srivastava offers six strategies which you can use instead of or alongside a PAP to allow for more flexible analysis without letting you fool yourself.
  • Daniel Kahneman explains why he’s become less interested in understanding happiness and more in how to live a satisfying life (if the article’s intermittently gated, try in your browser’s incognito mode). You can take Yale’s popular course on happiness, life satisfaction, and well-being from Professor Laurie Santos online for free and decide for yourself. A couple interesting observations from Kahneman, about British economist Richard Layard who started paying attention to the research and bringing improving overall happiness and well-being into policy there:

“The involvement of economists like Layard and Deaton made this issue more respectable,” Kahneman added with a smile. “Psychologists aren’t listened to so much. But when economists get involved, everything becomes more serious, and research on happiness gradually caught the attention of policy-making organizations.

“Much of Layard’s activity on behalf of happiness in England related to bolstering the mental health system. In general, if you want to reduce suffering, mental health is a good place to start – because the extent of illness is enormous and the intensity of the distress doesn’t allow for any talk of happiness.”

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • Good links from David McKenzie this week (as always), including this one from CSWEP on mentoring underrepresented minority women in economics.
  • As much as it pains me to link to both David *and* my other Friday links competitor, Tim Ogden of NYU’s faiV, (which focuses on financial inclusion) he’s got a really good piece on CGAP’s blog. It’s ostensibly on what can we expect to learn from financial inclusion research, but really about systematic reviews and meta-analyses in general, and how we’re limited by the scope of very specific studies, and lack of standardized reporting. Studies are often limited in scope to begin with (for instance, analyzing effects of a financial product on individual users, but not spillovers on the economy as a whole), then once you start reducing and reducing to just what’s common among studies AND reported in a way that’s comparable, you’ve limited the scope of what can be concluded. Standardized reporting might be a helpful solution.
  • The National Academies had a task force of big brains assigned to figure out how to cut U.S. child poverty in half in a decade (which the U.K. did between 2001-2008) . Here’s a good summary of what they recommended. Even shorter highlights:
    • Without current programs, child poverty would be higher than it is now, so we’re already helping
    • Just expanding two existing programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit would do half the job by themselves
    • Reducing child poverty would likely save the country substantial amounts of money in the long run through increased employment, lowered healthcare costs, and reduced incarceration
  • In honor of my absentee landlord Chris, here’s advice on writing a book if you happen to be considering it, from financial writer Jason Zweig.
  • If you want to know what Chris is teaching now, see his lecture slides from the first couple weeks of his Order and Violence class.
  • From the Arnold Foundation, programs which have positive RCT results may have their effects fade over time, which you never know if you don’t do long-term follow-up. This is similar to what Chris, Nathan Fiala, and Sebasian Martinez found with IPA in Uganda doing a 9-year follow up of a cash grant/transfers program. Grantees who got $400 increased their earnings for a number of years (compared to a control group which didn’t), but by 9 years out, the control group had caught up and had similar earnings. (All those intermediate years of increased earnings were more than the amount they received, so it worked, but we should be careful about extrapolating beyond the time period for which we have data.) h/t Marc Gunther
  • Jobs:

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IPA’s weekly links

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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 ask. See his thoughtful response to David’s post here.
  • I’m continually stunned by how prevalent intimate partner violence is in places where development economists work, and how under-studied it is in development. For example, the WHO estimates over 50% of women sampled in Uganda have experienced that kind of violence. Seems like that would have as big an impact on people’s daily life as plenty of more commonly studied topics. The good news is that there’s reason to think plenty of things that researchers do work on – education, livelihoods, skills training – may also reduce violence at home. So IPA is offering money to add on research on intimate partner violence to existing or planned studies, and to do research on how to measure it. More information here, deadline May 17, and please share.
  • What if everything we’ve been told about the giant impacts of early childhood interventions is wrong? The conventional “Heckman Curve” wisdom argues that the earlier the childhood intervention, the higher the returns, but I’ve also heard child development folks quietly say that interventions work at all ages and we shouldn’t privilege any one window. Andrew Gelman discusses a meta analysis that indeed disputes the early childhood window idea. He suggests original analysis may be heavily skewed by two small and unusual studies.
  • A primer on the Indian elections, from political scientist Tariq Thachil
  • Johannes Haushofer explains his new paper with Ingvild Almås and Jeremy Shapiro about whether a calorie-based poverty trap exists. Do people not get enough food to work effectively, which keeps them poor and not getting enough calories? Using GiveDirectly cash transfer experiment data, they don’t think so.
  • It’s always a treat to learn from historian of economic thought Beatrice Cherrier. Here she traces 100+ years of discussion on whether economics can be value neutral. (original tweet version)
  • Justin Wolfers’: Other People’s Tweets on How to use Twitter Effectively.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

AAS inductees

  • 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 support from the Gates Foundation, IPA, with J-PAL, CEGA, the IGC, CGD, Northwestern’s Global Poverty Research Lab, & Yale’s Y-RISE, are going to launch a COVID research hub next week listing ongoing research studies (with data & results when ready), funding opportunities, and survey research instruments. If you or anyone you know is working on a COVID project in development, please submit your instruments from the link there so the community can share compatible research tools and coordinate work. And please share with your colleagues!
  • Realizing the situation of the job market, IPA’s Peace and Recovery program, led academically by Chris Blattman, is offering a new one-year postdoc related to peace, violence, fragility, and recovery, suitable for someone from econ, political science, psych or related training.
  • Massive crop-eating locust swarms are heading back to East Africa, and much bigger than before, while COVID has disrupted the supply chain for pesticides.
  • David’s Dev Impact links today include helpful ones on new COVID papers and funding for COVID research.
  • A couple of interesting papers using cell phone data with current relevance:
    • A new paper from Nicolas Ajzenman, Tiago Cavalcanti, & Daniel Da Mata looks at a country highly politically divided where a President who has a questionable relationship with science minimized the COVID threat in early days and find words matter. They find that after Brazilian president Bolsonaro gave speeches minimizing the importance of social distancing, people in municipalities where he had strong support did less social distancing.
    • Sveta Milusheva uses 15 billion mobile phone records in Senegal to track movement from areas with more malaria cases to areas with fewer, and matches it up with data showing an accordant rise in new infections at the destinations. She estimates:

“an infected traveler contributes to 1.7 additional cases reported in the health facility at the traveler’s destination. This paper develops a simulation-based policy tool that uses mobile phone data to inform strategic targeting of travelers based on their origins and destinations. The simulations suggest that targeting informed by mobile phone data could reduce the caseload by 50 percent more than current strategies that rely only on previous incidence.”

  • A new paper estimates the return on investment for personal protective equipment for community health workers in low and middle-income countries at $241.1 billion or 6,918% (h/t Grant Gordon). In my brief glance that’s just the immediate ROI; during the  Ebola outbreak, researchers estimated the deaths of healthcare workers would lead to more child and maternal deaths even after the outbreak (h/t Dave Evans)
  • If you’re having weird or vivid dreams these days, it’s not just you (h/t Osman Siddiqi)

And it’s not your imagination, all commercials are alike these days (h/t David Batcheck)

 

 

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Science Cover

  • 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 league and found it improved social cohesion, but changed attitudes extended only to Muslims in the league, not beyond. Summary here, explanatory thread by editor Tage Rai, and commentary from Betsy Levy Paluck and Chelsey Clark explaining the significance of the work.
    • She worked contemporaneously and shared ideas with Matt Lowe, who mixed cricket teams across caste in India with similarly positive outcomes (h/t Seema Jayachandran for the reminder). Chris Blattman called them two of the best conflict-related papers of recent years.
  • A conversation between Amartya Sen, Angus Deaton, and Tim Besley on economics and morals, and also reminiscing (video here).
  • Looks like the WHO is creating a Nudge Unit for health (closest explanation I could find is this job posting that already passed)
  • Speaking of jobs, Arifu, a Nairobi-based mobile information sharing platform, has a few open, including for a researcher (BA/MA level) to do A/B testing and (eventually) impact evals.
  • Alaka Holla, Billy Jack, and Owen Ozier have created a free edX class: Impact Evaluation Methods with Applications in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. It seems like it would be particularly helpful for those in schools, or countries, without access to the classes for learning methods basics, so please share widely.
  • Podcasts:
    • Conversations with Tyler with Nathan Nunn (Apple) was really good, about economic history and why culture is undervalued in development, even though it’s hard to measure. An interesting tidbit at the end is when he reflects on growing up and being able to work your way up from working class in Canada vs. the U.S.
    • Rough Translation (Apple) on the Venezuelan anti-corruption bureaucrat turned Ecuadorian lumberjack who led a group of Venezuelan refugees *walking* back to Venezuela.
    • The Hidden Curriculum is a new podcast (Apple), on what you should know about going through econ grad school
  • I shared some tips on looking at Ph.D. programs and considering non-academic careers (psych in my case, but hopefully these are general enough).
  • A clever visual investigative journalism explainer on how Mauritius became a center for corporate tax dodging in Africa.
  • 60 Decibels has a really nice interactive visualization of their results (with qual quotes), on the impact of COVID in rural Kenya.

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IPA’s weekly links

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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 independent Republic of Congo (now the DRC) to be returned to his family. In 1961 Patrice Lumumba had been in the job for three months when the Belgian government had him killed, along with two family members. And his “remains” consists of a tooth, because the Belgian authorities also ordered his body to be dissolved in acid. Longer story (for those with strong stomachs) here.
  • An interesting paper by Obie Porteous, analyzing 27,000 econ papers about Africa finds:

“45% of all economics journal articles and 65% of articles in the top five economics journals are about five countries accounting for just 16% of the continent’s population. I show that 91% of the variation in the number of articles across countries can be explained by a peacefulness index, the number of international tourist arrivals, having English as an official language, and population.”

The “big five” locations that dominate Western econ are Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Ghana, and Malawi. On Conversations with Tyler recently, Tyler Cowen asked Nathan Nunn about this (particularly as relates to RCTs). Nunn responded that it’s very difficult to set up a research infrastructure, but once it’s there, it’s hard to go somewhere new and start again, and admitted that even though he doesn’t do RCTs he’s fallen into the same pattern.

  • A cool-looking paper from Agyei-Holmes, Buehren, Goldstein, Osei, Osei-Akoto, & Udry looks at a land titling program in Ghana (I know, see above, but to be fair, I know that at least Udry’s been doing research in Ghana for 30 years, and two of the authors are at Ghanaian institutions). The paper looks at how giving formal ownership to farmers increased their investments into their land and agricultural output. Except that it did the opposite – interestingly, when people got titles to the land, the value of the land increased and the owners, particularly women, shifted to other types of work, and business profits went up.

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IPA’s weekly links

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Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

  • I’m working on a new email newsletter, with colleagues including Rachel Strohm (who has been a well-respected dev blogger for years). IPA’s tracking studies on COVID related issues in low- and middle-income countries (along with survey instruments and funding opportunities) on our RECOVR research hub (please submit yours, and let colleagues know). Every other week we’re highlighting some new results from there and elsewhere we come across, particularly as relates to social protection, but also related topics. Volumes one and two are on our blog, and you can sign up to get it on our email list (after you sign up you can adjust which kinds of emails you get).
  • I’ve been skeptical of the nudge craze but have been eagerly awaiting the results of the NYC Summons redesign (image above) from Ideas42 for a while, and the results, published last week in Science, are better than I expected. Alissa Fishbane, Aurelie Ouss, Anuj K. Shah report on an experiment with New York City redesigning summons that police officers issue for low-level offenses, requiring people to appear in court. About 100,000 people miss their court dates in the city every year, causing arrest warrants to be issued, but simply redesigning the form to be more understandable and explaining what’s required of people reduced failures to show up from 47% to 40.8%. Adding an additional text message reminder brought it down to 28%. (Summary from Science’s news side here). The tragedy of all the lives ruined by bad administrative design is hard to ignore.
  • Ideas42 is also working on an interesting new project, Ideas42 Ventures, which is looking to support entrepreneurs working on software solutions to social problems, specifically excess costs of poverty (deadline to apply, Oct 25).
  • Michel Azulai, Imran Rasul, Daniel Rogger, and Martin Williams report on an RCT of a simple one-day management training for members of Ghana’s civil service, and found effects on knowledge, attitudes, and team productivity 6-18 months later.
  • I’ve been listening to some of today’s Penn-Wharton Conference on Race and Economics (live stream here, don’t know how long it will last), A couple things that jumped out at me from the panel discussing racial inclusion in the field were Modibo Sidibe saying he couldn’t advise someone who’s in a minority group to go into an econ graduate program, knowing all the obstacles they’d face (though not everybody shared his assessment). Mackenzie Alston pointed out that many of the voluntary information and programs intended to remedy the problems end up with only those already motivated and interested attending. Lisa Cook pointed out that out of all the top econ programs, one – Berkeley – has accounted for a disproportionate share (maybe 40%?) of Black econ Ph.D.s and perhaps other departments could find out what they’re doing. All departments and colleagues should be aware of the AEA’s Best Practices for Building a More Diverse, Inclusive, and Productive Profession resources.
  • EGAP is offering $10,000 grants (deadline Dec 15) to scholars from the Global South for studying either
    1. the role of political conditions in enabling or preventing effective societal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic;
      or
    2. the way the COVID-19 pandemic, and its associated economic, social, and psychological stresses, is affecting different dimensions of elections around the globe.
  • IPA”s Peace and Recovery Program is offering a variety of kinds of funding, including for pilots and early career scholar, for different kinds of research around
    • Reducing violence and promoting peace
    • Reducing “fragility” (i.e. fostering state capability and institutions of decision-making)
    • Preventing, coping with, and recovering from crises, including COVID-19
    • Addressing homicide in Latin America and the Caribbean

Application details, guiding principles (explaining what they’re looking for in an application), previously funded projects, and more from Chris Blattman the academic lead for the program. Deadline Nov 20th.

  • And have we passed the peak? (don’t read down in the thread)

 

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PhD applicants: Writing your statement of purpose

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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 are some personal thoughts.

[Note: You can now subscribe by email to receive posts to your inbox.]

First, let’s clarify your number one job as an applicant: Send the best, clearest signal of your abilities as a future researcher, and minimize the noise around that signal. I explain why in a longer post on whether and how you should apply to PhD programs (including the other elements of an application packet):

the fundamental problems in graduate admissions are “information overload” and “noise”. For every slot in a PhD program, there are probably 30 to 50 applicants. A department that plans to have a class of 20 students may receive 1000 applications.

Meanwhile, most departments delegate admissions to a small committee of two to six faculty. They don’t have time to read 1000 applications in detail. And the committee may change every year. Thus, their experience may be limited. And you never know who will be on the committee or what they care about. This adds further randomness.

These faculty want to admit the most talented and creative young researchers who will push the field ahead. And they also want you to pass all the most technical classes, because they hate kicking students out. So the admissions committee are looking for strong signals of intelligence, creativity, determination, and other proclivities for research.

But this is hard. There are too many applications. Applicants don’t have many good ways to signal quality. All applicants are trying to send the same signals. And there is a ton of uncertainty around each signal. Hence: Information overload and noise.

Yet most schools as for a written statement of some kind. Sometimes they ask for both a biographical statement and a research statement. What do they want and what should you write?

  1. Don’t tell your life story. This statement is not an undergrad entry essay where you describe your life’s trials and tribulations, or your journey to wanting to do a PhD. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s just that it’s probably not relevant to judging your ability as a researcher. If it is, then weave that into the narrative around your research interests and plans. We have hundreds of these things to read and so you only want to focus on the most important information.
  2. Don’t be cliché. Do not start your with your epiphany—the day the scales fell from your eyes and you realized you wanted to be a professor, or were inspired tackle big questions and social issues. Especially if it involves a child in a poor country. This approach is overused and unoriginal, and the information does not help us judge whether you will be a great researcher (see point 1).
  3. Most material is unnecessary and unhelpful; delete it. Be information dense. Every sentence should communicate important ideas and information about your abilities as a researcher. You see, there are so many applications that readers are looking for an excuse to stop reading or skip a paragraph. Busy people will look at your statement for for 20 seconds. If its information dense they will look at it for for 45 or maybe 60 seconds. Every time you give banal information, it is another reason to stop reading. Some examples of things you should avoid:
    • Platitudes about wanting to be a professor or researcher
    • Generic or flattering statements about being excited to join a program, your admiration for the faculty, etc.
    • Unspecific interests in a research subject or field
    • Routine information such as “I am graduating in May…”
    • Filler sentences like “Please find enclosed…”
  4. The reader should immediately understand what kind of scholar you want to be. I recommend that he first 1-2 paragraphs of your statement do the following:
    • Start with your broad fields of interest (e.g. “I am principally interested in labor and development economics” or “I want to work at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations”)
    • Then give 2-3 examples of broad topics and questions that interest you. (“I’m interested in studying inefficiencies in labor markets, especially market power and monopsony. I’m also interested in…”)
    • You can also describe who you would like to work with in the department and why this is a good fit. Sometimes I suggest putting this at the end, after the specific research proposal. Wherever you put this, make sure that most of the faculty you mention:
      • Are tenure or tenure-track faculty
      • Have their primary appointment in the department you are applying to
      • Are actually there and take students (i.e. they didn’t retire last year, etc.)
  5. Then develop 1-2 of these ideas as specifically as possible. This is the core of your statement. The idea is not to say “this is what I will do for my dissertation”. No applicant knows that. The goal is to show that you know how to ask an answer an interesting and innovative research question. This is hard to do (because you don’t yet have a PhD) but doing it well is a good signal of your creativity, knowledge of the field, and potential as a researcher.
    • You could discuss two ideas in moderate depth, or one idea in greater depth. Either way, I recommend this research discussion be 40-60% of your entire statement.
    • Ideally this is a question or topic of current interest in the field. One thing I often see is that students are focussed on the research frontier 10 years ago (because those are the papers they read in their classes) and are not clued in to some of the current puzzled and priorities. This is hard to avoid, but some reading and your advisors should be able to help you avoid this.
    • The best discussions will (if empirical) identify interesting data and discuss plausible empirical strategies. This is difficult, which is why it is a good signal if you do it well.
    • It’s important to locate your question in the literature without overdoing that discussion. Try to motivate the question with reference to recent and recognizable research papers and agendas. If you are mainly citing articles with few citations, in lower-ranked journals, this is a sign that you need to link your idea to bigger debates in the field, or perhaps rethink the question you are proposing.
    • This is (in my experience) the most crucial section for most social science departments. Except possibly economics. It’s not clear how seriously many departments take your statement in economics, and some of my colleagues profess to never look at the statement. That may be true, but some will look, and you have to have a statement, so I suggest following this advice to make it a research proposal.
  6. Only if necessary, give information that might help us understand any apparent weaknesses or puzzles in your application. Some examples:
    • Why you studied physics but now are doing political science
    • What happened in that single bad semester on your transcript
    • How to interpret your foreign GPA, and where you ranked in your class
    • Clarify your classes if they have off names (e.g. “My class called XX was a Real Analysis class using textbook X, and so I have all the mathematical requirements for entry.”
  7. Get help. Your letter writers, professors you work for, or PhD student you know can read and give feedback on your statements. Ask them for their advice. Do this early–a couple months before the application, ideally. they can help you frame your question in a more interesting way, decide what papers to mention, or what is or is not frontier.
  8. Don’t be repetitive. This is not the place to restate your CV (“First I worked for Professor… and then I worked for…”). They have your CV. Use this document to do something no other in your application can do. Only mention work or other experience if you can add essential, high-density information the reader cannot get elsewhere in the application packet. Maybe you picked up specific technical skills working on a project that relate to the research proposal you just described? If not, you don’t have to say anything at all about your past. Just let the research proposal speak for itself.
  9. Delete useless words and sentences! After you have deleted all the plartitudes and routine sentences (see point 3) keep deleting! Every extraneous word or sentence lowers the average quality of the document. Look for the least useful paragraphs. Delete them, or at least cut most of that material. Try to make a 6-line paragraph 4 lines. Try to make a 15-word sentence 10 words.
    1. I recommend using the Hemingway Editor as a tool to write more clearly. Some long and complex sentences are ok, but sparingly. And they can often be improved. Aim for a grade 10 reading level.
  10. Make it easy to skim and read quickly. In particular:
    • Use active voice
    • Omit needless material and words (see points 3 and 9)
    • Limit jargon
    • Each paragraph should be a distinct idea
    • Paragraphs should have a hierarchical structure, with the big idea or general point as the first topic sentence, and the rest of the paragraph elaborates. Someone should be able to get an “executive summary” but simply reading the first line in every paragraph. they should make sense as a story/summary.
    • Use subheadings if possible, to delineate sections such as your broad fields of interest (point 4), your research proposal (point 5), and other key information (point 6)

This is just my view. Other professors will have different preferences and advice here. So ask them. Get more opinions. Or put your advice in the comments below.

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