Scaling up agricultural policy interventions: Evidence from Uganda

A new methodology combining experimental data with a quantitative model sheds light on the household-level and distributional effects of scaling up agricultural policies.

Aprobando la transparencia y rechazando la polarización

A menos de una semana del plebiscito de salida, Chile vive momentos de alta incertidumbre y polarización política. Dado el terreno fértil para la proliferación de las “fake news”, es altamente deseable que el análisis experto contribuya a separar realidad factual de especulación, quitándole combustible a la polarización. Pero lamentablemente esto no siempre ocurre.

How to make research better, more transparent, and ethical?

Working in science and research is a continuous process of comparing, discussing, rediscovering, calculating, programming, building consensus and debating. On top of that, researchers must be prepared to repeat their experiments, rethink their approach, and sometimes revise statements and admit that an error has been made. To help further the development of evidence-based knowledge, science …

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Money or Power? Financial Infrastructure and Optimal Policy

During times of crisis, do people prefer cash or in-kind transfers, and why? To study this, we ran surveys with more than 2,000 respondents across two separate contexts: urban Kenya and urban Ghana.

Ending the pandemic in low and middle income countries

As SARS-COV2 reaches an endemic state, many high-income countries are trying to maintain low fatality rates through widespread vaccination. In contrast, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) across Africa and Asia have made uneven progress towards managing the pandemic. In this essay we summarize our Annual Review of Economics article in which we look back at …

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Credibilidad y transparencia en políticas públicas

Las elecciones en Chile, si bien únicas para el país, también revelan ciertos elementos en común con el resto del planeta. La creciente polarización, y el aumento vertiginoso de las noticias falsas, son fenómenos que dificultan el debate constructivo en Chile, y en el mundo. En este contexto, consideramos urgente identificar mecanismos que nos ayuden …

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Edward Miguel on Collecting Economic Data by Canoe and Correlating Conflict with Rainfall

Audio available via Freakonomics Radio – People I Mostly Admire Podcast He’s a pioneer of using randomized control experiments in economics — studying the long-term benefits of a $1 health intervention in Africa. Steve asks Edward, a Berkeley professor, about Africa’s long-term economic prospects, and how a parking-ticket-scandal in New York City led to a …

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Edward Miguel on the “Replication Crisis” in Economics and How to Fix It

Audio available at Technology Policy Institute. We’ve been pushing our disciplines towards open science, towards research transparency in various ways, and we felt the need, we really felt compelled to put a lot of what we were doing and learning in one place to make it accessible so that students and policymakers and seasoned researchers …

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Introducing the Social Science Reproduction Platform, a resource for teaching and improving computational reproducibility

Computational reproducibility, or the ability to reproduce results, tables, and other figures using the available data, code, and materials, through a process of reproduction, is necessary for instilling trust in science. Sharing data and code–the building blocks for reproducibility–allows researchers to build on top of each other’s work and illuminates tacit knowledge linked to the …

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Vernachlässigte Krankheiten: Die Welt darf jetzt nicht nachlassen!

Covid-19 hat uns deutlich gezeigt, wie sich Krankheiten auf jeden Aspekt unseres Lebens auswirken – und wie Infektionskrankheiten arme Menschen überproportional hart treffen können. Die Welt steht vor großen Herausforderungen durch die neuen Virusvarianten, insbesondere B.1.617.2, auch Delta genannt. Aber während wir versuchen, neue Infektionswellen zu bekämpfen und die Welt gegen Covid-19 zu impfen, laufen wir …

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Op-Ed: How foreign aid for medicine yields big economic returns

President Biden’s decision to donate 500 million COVID-19 vaccines to other countries by June 2022 is an important step toward restoring the United States’ global standing. Another, parallel foreign policy solution could perhaps do even more. It is simple, cost-effective and could improve the health and well-being of billions of people — especially children. Inexpensive treatments — …

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Money or power? Choosing COVID-19 aid in Kenya

Participants in an experiment comparing demand for cash transfers and electricity subsidies in urban Kenya, overwhelmingly prefer cash given the proliferation of mobile money via platforms like M-PESA and preference for short-term liquidity. Conversely, in rural Kenya, slightly more respondents opted for electricity token transfers given that they face saving constraints with the concern that …

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