Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action
- Two Blattman-related things, for researchers and aspiring researchers:
- IPA’s Peace and Recovery program is accepting research proposals, on topics such as war, peace, electoral violence, state-sponsored violence, terrorism, forced displacement, natural disasters, and recovery from all the above.
They fund: “full randomized trials, pilot studies, exploratory and descriptive work, travel grants, and (in rare but deserving cases) non-experimental evaluations.”
Applications from early career researchers (including Ph.D. and post-docs) are welcome, and there are small exploratory funds (under $10k) earmarked for them.
Deadline December 6th, more here, and you can see previously funded work here. - For those who want to do that work someday and want to work with Chris, a very cool Senior RA job posting, to work with Chris in Liberia following up in a landmark study (summary & ungated paper) combining cognitive behavioral therapy with cash transfers for seriously at risk youth (if I recall, interviews were sometimes interrupted so the respondent could go pickpocket someone.) Three reasons I think this follow-up project is cool:
-It’s part of a burgeoning literature on mindset/psychological interventions, and answers questions about the lasting effects. It’s also Chris’ 3rd study following up on the long-term effects of cash transfers, and the first 2 have yielded interesting findings.
-Methodologically, working in these circumstances is really interesting. The original team developed a new method to figure out if people were telling the truth in surveys on questions like how much crime they were committing.
-The original cognitive-behavioral program was developed by Johnson Borh, a Liberian conflict survivor. You can hear him and Chris talking about it on Freakonomics here.
Feel free to send the job link to anybody who might be interested (and really good)
- IPA’s Peace and Recovery program is accepting research proposals, on topics such as war, peace, electoral violence, state-sponsored violence, terrorism, forced displacement, natural disasters, and recovery from all the above.
- I asked for non-academic jobs for Ph.D.s. – here’s one doing evals w/ the American Institutes for Research in DC, and with Mercy Corps directing research on conflict, governance, and migration (being vacated by Rebecca Wolfe, who’s going to UChicago). Feel free to send me more.
- An amazing interview between Dave Evans and Nobel laureate Michael Kremer this week. I wish I could pick just one excerpt, but it was all really great (stay for the questions at the end). Video here, and audio below for those on the go:
- Also see Dave’s blog post summarizing 100+ papers by Esther Duflo
- Damon Jones shares his spreadsheet system for keeping track of travel expenses and reimbursements.
- A group of Stanford researchers, including political scientist Shelby Grossman, caught Russian-run fake Facebook accounts trying to influence public political opinion in four African countries.
- In Israel, random assignment of Jewish patients to an Arab doctor (vs a Jewish one) reduces social distance and increases perceptions of possibilities for peace among the patients (via John Holbein).
- I’m still processing this psych paper where 49 authors from 15 research teams tested 5 hypotheses with >15,000 participants (there was also a prediction component), and did both meta and Bayesian analyses on the effect sizes/replicability. As you can see from the graph above, there was a lot of variation in replication, but (if I understand), they attribute it mainly to the choices the research teams made in how to test the hypotheses (e.g. study design). I can’t decide if it’s good or bad news that researcher choices in how to answer the same question yields so much variation.
