And now that Alvin Roth (see his blog) and Lloyd Shapley just received the Nobel Prize in Economics, the sweet link of the day: Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates It seems that we don’t know much on which anti-corruption policies are effective (or not), but crowd-mapping corruption with mobile phones has spread from India to Russia, Colombia and … [Read more...] about Chocolate and Nobel prizes, corruption, your favorite tweeters and more random Monday links
Beyond development effectiveness
Do policy briefs work?
The International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in collaboration with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation just published a rigorous assessment - based on an randomized control design- that tries answer the question: Do policy briefs affect readers’ beliefs? The answers turn out to be not that … [Read more...] about Do policy briefs work?
Cable cars, reading glasses for kids, and other random Monday links
The must read for this week: the 2013 World Bank Development Report on jobs is out today. What will OXFAM say?. Unexpected partners in crime: A randomized experiment just published in the American Journal of Epidemiology shows (gated) that the introduction of Metrocable in Medellin- a new cable-propelled transit system - show that interventions in neighborhood physical … [Read more...] about Cable cars, reading glasses for kids, and other random Monday links
A must, must read
James Heckman just published a must, must read on the critical importance of early childhood development. This is the first sentence. The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today. And this is the last paragraph … [Read more...] about A must, must read
Random Monday links
Financing the family: Remittances to Central America in a time of crisis. On theories of change: Many randomized control trials in international development fail to pay adequate attention to collecting data around the intervention’s theory of change. And so the authors resort to non-evidence based speculation to explain their findings. But without such explanation the … [Read more...] about Random Monday links