Eva Vivalt

This is a hideous norm that must be stopped.

I remember specifically being taught in school to use the passive voice when writing “science”. The problem is that it disguises what actually happened, and implementation details matter. That studies can be done in a vacuum might hold true for a few narrow disciplines but is generally misleading. It also constrains the future use of the data.

As an example of how paucity of details can hurt, in AidGrade’s dataset, we have the year the study was published, or the year of the working paper if the paper was not published. Collaborators at Stanford are interested in matching Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data to the geocoded interventions to investigate the long-run effects. For this, we need the year the intervention itself began and ended. More than 25% of the studies for which this was coded turn out not to have this information.

Worse, when how a program was implemented matters, many studies do not report this information in sufficient detail.

I would like to have a “how to write well” book to recommend to people. Any suggestions?

I was thrilled that Angus Deaton won the Nobel prize. Nobody in development economics had won in a very long time, and Deaton’s prize was very well-deserved. An embarrassing personal anecdote should help illustrate: back when I was applying to grad school, I was astonished to find that he was still at Princeton because I assumed that with the large amount of work he had put out, he must be a mythical figure long since deceased.

Deaton won for his work on poverty and welfare, as others have highlighted (see, for example, Chris Blattman or Tyler Cowen’s excellent summaries).

More recently, he has gotten a lot of attention for his skepticism of randomized controlled trials. I am very familiar with the debate, especially due to my controversial paper which found a lot of heterogeneity in treatment effects – essentially bringing a lot of data to the debate.

I think that the point that Deaton was making was more nuanced than how it is often described and applies to quasi-experimental studies as well as randomized controlled trials: that we should simply be more modest in our claims about what we know.

This is very honest, and I think in the long run we will look back and wonder why there was ever any controversy over such a claim.

This semester, I am teaching a small seminar class for undergraduates on economic development.

The goal of the class is to write a research paper, and the syllabus is here. If you would like to follow along with the course, the webpage is here.