Happy to share: “Economic Empowerment and Mental Health: Evidence from India” (with Sulagna Mookerjee) is accepted at Economic Development and Cultural Change :) Full Paper: www.ajinkyakeskar.com/files/MHDraf...
I've built a new tool!
You can upload your pre-analysis plan or registered report, pre-submission to a registry or journal, and it will screen it for completeness, clarity, and consistency. 1/ 🧵
Why do educational intervention impacts fade? Isn't catch-up a good thing? Are sleeper effects real? Does fadeout mean failure?
@drewhalbailey.bsky.social, Tyler Watts, and I address these questions & more in an EdNext piece & 4 new working papers!
www.educationnext.org/why-do-most-...
It must be very hard to publish null results Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.
I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
You're right, one does not necessarily imply the other; was running out of characters. Here'a link to my JMP, which I framed as being about school choice and sorting, but is also about tracking (across schools). We don't have a WP for the classroom tracking yet. Link to my JMP (accepted at ReStat):
Two screenshots of Economist articles: One praises the potential of EdTech, the other says it is "mostly useless".
Updating my slides on why asking "Does EdTech work?" is useless
www.economist.com/leaders/2017...
www.economist.com/united-state...
For far more helpful takes:
www.brookings.edu/articles/rea...
voxdev.org/voxdevlit/ed...
All #econjobmarket tips in one place: https://statatexblog.com/useful-links/#from-graduate-to-post-graduate-the-econ-job-market
The Weiss Fund has a great new initiative for development economists on the PhD job market to support those taking up research positions in LMICs, offering supplementary income + research funds. Please share!
New publication in The Economic Journal “Qualitative Analysis With Large-N: A New Method with An Application to Aspirations in Bangladesh.”https://academic.oup.com/ej/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ej/ueag005/8417166?redirectedFrom=fulltext Also available here vijayendrarao.org/wp-content/u...
Computer-assisted learning in the real world: How Khan Academy influences student math learning
doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Brand-new findings w/ a large team show that multicomponent intervention targeting widespread violence in schools in Zambia does ⬆️ student discussions about violence in schools, but does not shift violence itself
ideas.repec.org/p/wb...
Human capital is central to growth, and the elimination of poverty. Discussing obstacles to human capital accumulation and evidence on policies that can promote it, from Philippe Aghion, Ingvild Almås, and Costas Meghir www.nber.org/papers/w34602
I often hear about how tough it is for kids to learn to read in a language they don't understand. True!
Also tough for kids to learn to read from a teacher who doesn't speak the language they're supposed to be teaching in. wiki.santafe.edu/images/e/ec/...
Lasting change requires more than cash—interventions adding information meetings and home visits produce real, sustained gains for mothers and children, from Richard Akresh, Damien de Walque, Harounan Kazianga, and Abigail Stocker www.nber.org/papers/w34578
Evaluating a soft-skills course implemented in Ugandan and Kenyan primary schools that replaced academic review time with lessons on goal-setting and related skills as students prepared for primary school-leaving exams, from Dam, Gray-Lobe, Kremer, de Laat, and Morsink www.nber.org/papers/w34562
Woah.
Argentina's 1990s preschool expansion program appears to have been a smashing success.
The program increased high school completion by a whole 11.9 percentage points.
The authors estimate that for every $1 spent, the preschool expansion generated about $11 in benefits.
My friend Xu has a WP out!
He and prof Zhengwei use CEPS data to show private tutoring exacerbates inequality via the "rat race": intense competition degrades class atmosphere and demotivates non-tutored peers, causing them to give up
Link here papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Pre-school in Africa works.
"on average, these programmes are successful in improving children's cognitive outcomes by 0.10 standard deviations (p-value < 0.01) [and] children's socioemotional development by 0.09 standard deviations (p-value < 0.01)."
academic.oup.com/jae/advance-...
The EdDev Community Group will meet tomorrow at 11 AM ET. Alejandro Ganimian will present work in progress. Join the EdDev Community Group today aefpweb.org/communit...
Cool new @cesifo.org paper, documenting "teaching to the top":
www.ifo.de/en/cesifo/pu...
Forthcoming in AEJ: Applied Economics: "From Access to Achievement: The Primary School-Age Impacts of an At-Scale Preschool Construction Program in Highly Deprived Communities" by Bassi, Besbas, Dinarte-Diaz, Ravindran, and Reynoso. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
Today's cool young researcher #econtwitter #econsky is @palaashbhargava postdoc @UChicago who works on topics related to development, labor + social networks
New guidance on EdTech in developing countries, by @singhabhi.bsky.social , @lnavarrosola.bsky.social , and Philip Oreopoulos
This looks good!
voxdev.org/voxdevlit/ed...
I have a new VoxDev Lit launching this week on education technology👇
This area has lots of froth, but also some very promising evidence on tech use (on teaching, assessments, information) across K-12.
Pulling this together was fun (with Phil Oreopoulos
and @lnavarrosola.bsky.social ).
Exciting news on @malengo.org, the NGO that helps East African students move to Europe for education: Our research team has given us a glimpse of their early findings!
Here is the full writeup, joint with @richardnerland.bsky.social:
forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CpZYHk...
Thread follows!
The World Bank plans to “operationally align” its research arm. But the changes could undermine its ability to deliver rigorous, independent analysis free from client or internal pressure.
More from @charlesjkenny.bsky.social and @eeshani.bsky.social ⬇️
https://go.cgdev.org/43vNSgK
Can Tutoring—and Technology—Finally Solve Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem? www.gettingsmart.com/2025/11/25/c...
🚀 I’m excited to share that I’m on the #EconSky job market this year! In my #EconJMP, I study how teachers in Finnish upper secondary schools impact students’ socio-emotional skills – and the labor market returns of these effects! (🧵, 1/N)
The EdDev Community Group will meet tomorrow at 11 AM ET. Vatsal Khandelwal & Nneka Esther Osadolor will present work in progress. Join the EdDev Community Group today aefpweb.org/communit...
