Weekly links April 23: RCT pointillism, the evaluation winners curse, subsidizing farmers to use machines, phone surveys and income expectations, and more…
· Federal Reserve of Minneapolis interview with Esther Duflo: she offers her thoughts on the growth and inequality relationship and why there isn’t a trade-off, on whether there will be sovereign defaults after COVID-19, and why doing RCTs is like a Seurat painting.
· The 2021 Clark Medal was awarded to Isaiah Andrews. A Fine Theorem does its usual excellent job in summarizing some of Isaiah’s research contributions and putting them in a broader context of applied econometric work. The Economist also covers the award, noting as one example a piece of his recent work that is likely to be of particular interest to our readers - the winners curse that arises when choosing the policy that performs best in a horse race of different treatments in an impact evaluation - estimation error leads us to over-
Weekly links January 15: Voices from Congolese research assistants on the research process, how the environment shapes behavior, using financial diaries in practice, and more…
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A must-read series: The (Silent) Voices blog Bukavu series is a set of posts by Congolese researchers and research assistants on the academic research production function, power dynamics, working in conflict-affected areas, ethics in research, the lack of relaying of results to survey respondents etc. (h/t Graeme Blair). Lots of compelling posts getting into many of the details of research in practice. Here are a few examples – there are 35 or so posts in the series!