Blog Archives

Development economics trading cards

Not quite, but these are awesome! Each card has a cute picture on the front and some key takeaway messages on the back. The idea is to give these kinds of cards out at conferences or events so that people

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Controversy in development economics

How to know you have hit upon a very controversial subject: two titans of development economics each castigate you for diametrically opposite reasons. Next time, I should let them fight directly! I am trying to use AidGrade’s data to say

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Big on BITSS

Briefly: BITSS is highly necessary. As mentioned in the new transparency series on CEGA’s blog, there are a lot of problems in the discipline today. Focusing on interaction terms or particular subgroups is one way of increasing the odds of

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Randomizing hurts.

AidGrade finished its topic selection for the next round of meta-analyses. One thing that we’re doing in this round is to randomize which topics we are working on (apart from also taking the winner of the popular vote). Suffice it

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The CPI, weirdos, and online shopping

After realizing that I save a few thousand dollars per year buying in bulk off the internet, I started to wonder how the CPI takes online shopping into account. The good news: it does try to. It has a telephone

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Academic proposal

This is a very old idea that I’m putting out in the public domain so that someone can use it. I’ve already shared it with several academics but so far nobody has tried to use it to my knowledge…. For

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Call for feedback

Over 100 million impressions. 50,000 tweets. Twitter dump here. This might be the last update of the twitter dump, as others have continued to scrape the tweets and have added in some of the data from the older tweets. Please

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Looking back on coining a viral hashtag + behavioural economics argument about tweeting

Pros: – You get to see it mentioned on almost every major online news source (NYTimes, FT, BBC, Washington Post, CNN, NBC, CBC, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, Businessweek, FastCompany, Huffington Post, SFGate, The Daily Beast, Slate…), almost every major tech source

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Some concrete things coming out of #pdftribute

#pdftribute as a hashtag is dying down, but several concrete endeavours are arising from many good people who were involved in or motivated by it. Here are a couple of initiatives about which I am aware (merely curating; this does

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On ownership, or the lack thereof

I want it to be clear that pdftribute is not “my” movement. It isn’t really anyone’s movement per se – if it were anyone’s, it probably wouldn’t be a movement! My involvement has been: thinking to put out the initial

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