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 …
Continue reading "Credibilidad y transparencia en políticas públicas"
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 …
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 …
Continue reading "Edward Miguel on the “Replication Crisis” in Economics and How to Fix It"
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 …
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 …
Continue reading "Vernachlässigte Krankheiten: Die Welt darf jetzt nicht nachlassen!"
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 — …
Continue reading "Op-Ed: How foreign aid for medicine yields big economic returns"
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 …
Continue reading "Money or power? Choosing COVID-19 aid in Kenya"
The Disastrous Neglect of Neglected Tropical Diseases
With the COVID-19 pandemic pushing even more of the world’s population into poverty and increasing the risk of debilitating illness, now is the time to redouble our efforts to combat neglected tropical diseases. And yet, increasing demands on government budgets seem poised to halt – and even reverse – hard-won progress. US President Joe Biden’s …
Continue reading "The Disastrous Neglect of Neglected Tropical Diseases"
Pre-results Review at the Journal of Development Economics: Lessons learned so far
In March 2018, the Journal of Development Economics (JDE) began piloting Pre-results Review track (also referred to as “registered reports” in other disciplines) in collaboration with the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). Through this track, the JDE reviewed and accepted detailed proposals for prospective empirical projects before results were available, offering …
Agricultural productivity and rural-urban wage gaps revisited: Lessons from panel data
Rich countries are industrial, poor countries are agricultural This simple observation intrigued early scholars, and prompted the conclusion that the key to economic development is the transition of economies out of agriculture and into ‘modern’ sectors. More recently, the question of whether there is ‘too much’ labour in agriculture in poor countries has seen renewed …
Does Solving Energy Poverty Help Solve Poverty? Not Quite
The head of Swedfund, the development finance group, recently summarized a widely-held belief: “Access to reliable electricity drives development and is essential for job creation, women’s empowerment and combating poverty.” This view has been the driving force behind a number of efforts to provide electricity to the 1.1 billion people around the world living in …
Continue reading "Does Solving Energy Poverty Help Solve Poverty? Not Quite"
Does Providing Electricity to the Poor Reduce Poverty? Research Suggests Not Quite
The head of Swedfund, the development finance group, recently summarized a widely-held belief: “Access to reliable electricity drives development and is essential for job creation, women’s empowerment and combating poverty.” This view has been the driving force behind a number of efforts to provide electricity to the 1.1 billion people around the world living in …