Associate Professor of Economics, University of Washington
I am currently reviewing a paper where the authors filed a lengthy analysis plan that does not actually say how they plan to analyze their data. This is an endemic problem in development economics RCTs. As a discipline we have adopted the ritual of filing pre-analysis plans (and the associated hassle cost) but not the Continue reading "Your pre-analysis plan should contain the plan for analyzing…
By Erik Andersen, Simon Graffy, Jason T. Kerwin, and Monica Lambon-Quayefio This post was originally posted on the IPA blog, and is re-posted here with permission: https://poverty-action.org/principals-coaches-ab-test-suggests-it-can-work IPA’s Partnership for Tech in Education (P4T-Ed) initiative supports the use of data and evidence to drive learning and improvement in the edtech sector. As part…
Lots of papers present their key results as bar charts with 95% confidence intervals shown as whiskers. Here s an example from one of my own slide decks: The problem with doing this is that we can t actually tell whether the key differences are statistically significant. The reduced-cost group is about a third of a grade Continue reading "If you re going to plot means and CIs, they should be 83%…
Last Thursday I was invited by UW s Economics Undergraduate Board to give this quarter s Paul Heyne Seminar—a public lecture about economics aimed at a general audience. My talk was about why USAID is great for America and also the world, why we should keep it, and how to make it work even better: The slides Continue reading "Why USAID is Great for America and the World" The post Why USAID is…
If you re using Beamer to make slides, your slides have way too much extra crap on them. Built-in navigation buttons at the bottom left, multiple layers of header and footer bars, dots that count the slides within each section, etc. People can just ignore that extra stuff, right? Wrong. Every change in color and pattern Continue reading "A LaTeX .sty file for making clean, clear slides" The post A…
I just saw someone making this mistake yet again, and realized that this is a bit of applied econometric wisdom that is not widely known. In papers based on RCTs it is standard for Table 1 to be a balance table, showing the means of baseline variables by study arm and testing for the equality Continue reading "Don t pick controls based on stars in your balance table" The post Don t pick controls…
There is a lot of writing advice out there and most of it is bad. Even worse, much writing advice is totally inapplicable to empirical science writing. Considering that, it s entirely likely that this advice will be bad as well. Thus—as with all advice—you should feel free to exercise free disposal on what follows. But Continue reading "How to get your paper done" The post How to get your paper…
If you are reading this post then you almost certainly have already heard of Effective Altruism, or EA. The EA movement has become increasingly influential over the past decade, and is currently getting a major publicity boost based on Will MacAskill’s new book What We Owe the Future, which among many other things was featured Continue reading "All Trains Lead to Crazy Town: Why I am Not an…
There is a lot of bad research out there. Huge fractions of the published research literature do not replicate, and many studies aren t even worth trying to replicate because they document uninteresting correlations that are not causal. This replication crisis is compounded by a scaleup crisis : even when results do replicate, they often do not Continue reading "The moral imperative for honesty in…
I recently posted a working paper where we argue that appointments can substitute for financial commitment devices. I’m pretty proud of this paper: it uses a meticulously-designed experiment to show the key result, and the empirical work is very careful and was all pre-specified. We apply the latest and best practices in selecting controls and Continue reading "Nothing Scales" The post Nothing…