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Income timing and liquidity constraints: Evidence from a randomized field...
I’m very happy to announce that my paper with Lasse Brune, “Income timing and liquidity constraints: Evidence from a randomized field experiment”, is now forthcoming at the Journal of Development...
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Do Literacy Programs Boost Reading at the Expense of Math Skills?
We recently got access to preliminary data on math exam scores from the randomized evaluation of the NULP. There are no effects of the program on average math scores. Even though that’s a null result,...
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How Important is Temptation Spending? Maybe Less than We Thought
Poor people often have trouble saving money for a number of reasons: the banks they have access to are low-quality and expensive (and far away), saving is risky, and money that they do save is often...
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“Pay Me Later”: A simple, cheap, and surprisingly effective savings technology
Why would you ask your employer not to pay you yet? This is something I would personally never do. If I don’t want to spend money yet, I can just keep it in a bank account. But it’s a fairly common...
View ArticleA Nobel Prize for Development Economics as an Experimental Science
Fifteen years ago I was an undergrad physics major, and I had just finished a summer spent teaching schoolchildren in Tanzania about HIV. The trip was both inspiring and demoralizing. I had gotten...
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Making the Grade: The Sensitivity of Education Program Effectiveness to Input...
I’m very happy to announce that my paper with Rebecca Thornton, “Making the Grade: The Sensitivity of Education Program Effectiveness to Input Choices and Outcome Measures”, has been accepted by the...
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Pay Me Later: Savings Constraints and the Demand for Deferred Payments
[This is a revised version of this earlier blog post about a previous draft of the same paper] Why would you ask your employer not to pay you yet? This is something I would personally never do. If I...
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Nothing Scales
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...
View ArticleThe moral imperative for honesty in development economics
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...
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All Trains Lead to Crazy Town: Why I am Not an Effective Altruist (or a...
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...
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