When it comes to female education, have we gotten it all backwards?
To get children to attend school in developing countries, our approach has been primarily to assume that the schooling that is available is worth pursuing, meaning that the problem must be with some...
View ArticleWhat do people mean when they talk about “transactional sex”?
If you are interested in HIV prevention, at some point you are likely to have heard “transactional sex” discussed as one of the issues. However, I find this discussion to usually be awkward and...
View ArticleIt's Hard To Save at Home
So say 87% of the respondents in a survey used by Dupas and Robinson in an interesting forthcoming paper on what happens when you help people get set up with bank accounts in Kenya. And, as we will...
View ArticleDads and Development
It’s Father’s Day here in America (although not in much of the rest of the World, see this cool interactive map). As a result, the newspapers are full of articles about the importance of Dads,...
View ArticleDads and Moms
Yesterday, David argued that “the important work on trying to raise the incomes and status of women around the world doesn’t continue to come in part by neglecting the important role you [dads] play.”...
View ArticleAre our blog readers better predictors of impact results than seminar...
I’ve been working for the last couple of years with Tara Vishwanath, Nandini Krishnan and Matt Groh on a pilot program in Jordan which aims to get young women just graduating from community college...
View ArticleHealth effects of non-health programs
The previous post in this blog discussed the positive dynamic effects of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in Mexico and Nicaragua – in particular on asset accumulation and the incidence of...
View ArticlePower of the Pill or Power of Abortion?
I am a dual citizen of two countries, both of which legalized safe abortions when I was little or young, meaning that I grew up taking a woman’s right to a safe abortion as granted. Usually, when I...
View ArticleBetter Nutrition Through Information
In honor of Labor Day here in the US, I want to talk about a recent nutrition paper by Emla Fitzsimons, Bansi Malde, Alice Mesnard and Marcos Vera-Hernandez. This paper, “Household Responses to...
View ArticlePull him down? How about pull her down...
Bouncing along a dusty road in Ghana, I had an eye-opening conversation with a colleague who was supervising a survey we were doing. It turns out he had been offered a more prestigious job, with a...
View ArticleDo Things Have to Get Worse for Women Before They Get Better?
While the U.S Presidential Debate on Tuesday night brought to the fore issues of gender equity in the U.S. (Binders Full of Women has more than 5,000 members on FB and @RomneyBinders has more than...
View ArticleShould we believe the hype about adolescent girls?
There aren't that many development initiatives I know that have their own slickly produced video, sponsored by a major corporation, let alone a parody. But the "girl effect," which makes the argument...
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Heterogeneity Matters: When the average hides what is true for most - Guest...
Development economists know that how husbands and wives make decisions affects many outcomes: savings, time use, and investment in education, health, agriculture, and business. While the literature has...
View ArticleNotes from the field: collecting gender disaggregated data in practice
So I have blogged in the past about the potential and the use of gender disaggregated data, but my work this past week in Ghana made me realize (again and in new ways) how complicated it can get in...
View ArticleDoes gender matter in migration? Why I don’t believe any studies which claim...
Since I’ve had three emails in one week asking me about this issue, I figured I might as well blog about it and have something to refer people to instead. The questions have all been variants of:·...
View ArticleIntroducing the Africa Gender Innovation Lab
Today I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about a new initiative that the Africa Region and the Research Group at the World Bank are launching today. The idea here is that we don't know enough...
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Getting organized for progress in agriculture
I recently came across a paper by Kelsey Jack which is a white paper for the J-PAL and CEGA Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative (ATAI). This paper systematically explores the barriers to...
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Calling it in: using phones for repeat surveys
In a working paper on the new LSMS-ISA (integrated surveys for agriculture) website, Brian Dillon describes the experience using phones in a research project he was working on with Diego Shirima,...
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Notes from the field: getting feedback on early analyses
I just spent the last week in Ethiopia and part of what I was doing was presenting some results from an impact evaluation baseline, as well as the final results-in-progress of another impact...
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Notes from the field: Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug
So this past week I was in Ghana following up on some of the projects I am working on there with one of my colleagues. We were designing an agricultural impact evaluation with some of our...
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