Outstanding funding opportunity for U.S. based/focused nonprofits that are smallish (<$10m revenue) to advance AI education and innovation. h/t @alexnawar.bsky.social openai.com/index/people...

Nice @markusgold.bsky.social and Juan Manuel Menendez post about how far empirical economics still needs to go in studying sub-Saharan Africa www.cgdev.org/blog/researc... Motivating for @poverty-action.bsky.social's initiative promoting LMIC research collabs poverty-action.org/research-col...

Really useful resource for RAs and others interested in doing field work in international settings, or any rigorous empirical work in social sciences @poverty-action.bsky.social just launched the IPA Knowledge Hub data.poverty-action.org

How can survey researchers and survey methodologists step in to shore up faith in official statistics? Unclear, but this blog by @jedkolko.bsky.social brings useful commentary about private sector's role in public data www.piie.com/blogs/realti...

Anybody else out there in an NGO spending thousands of dollars to prove to funders and auditors that you’re not wasting hundreds of dollars?

10 Things to Know About Adaptive Experimental Design buff.ly/Klwp446 #EGAPMethodsGuide

Yesterday, June 2, was an interesting day at work. I was reporting a story about how the Education Department hadn't delivered a report to Congress on the Condition of Education, despite the June 1 deadline mandated by law. 🧵 (1/9)

Is anyone on #EconTwitter or another social science aware of any evaluations of Promise Pay (in its use as a utility debt relief app--I know there can be other uses)? I'd appreciate any leads. Thanks!

Academics: how many hours would you set aside for prepping a class you've taught before in different forms, but not this particular audience and format, and level of background? Assume 32 hours of instructional time (lecture and prof-led discussion).

Our community must take this issue very seriously! ideally, we'd post these publicly: raw_no_pii.csv cleaning.R clean.rds analysis.R but destroy or archive privately: raw.csv remove_pii.R (was glad to see in this thread political science apparently does better than other fields but still)

Exclusive: National Science Foundation staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced.

@stuartbuck.bsky.social regularly puts out very thoughtful level-headed pieces on substack about science and social impact. This is just one of his gems. goodscience.substack.com/p/ngos-arent...

That sinking feeling when you're trying to access a really useful online repository of measurement tools and... it doesn't load. Then you remember it was USAID-funded. www.youthpower.org/resources/me...

Hey, some good news, ERIC lives!

Null findings are so important! ..as long as the study is well design, meaning interesting counterfactual, not a straw man. Through null finding studies we can learn tons about prevailing practice if we're as careful measuring control group experiences as treatment experiences w/interventions.

Congrats to the authors on this long-term followup of a famous trial that has influenced thinking on ed-tech for a while.

New working paper: Could AI leapfrog the web? Only 37% of sub-Saharan Africans use the internet. Cost is the #1 constraint. In a study with 469 teachers in Sierra Leone, we find AI works better than the web--and is 87% cheaper. arxiv.org/abs/2502.12397 Let's dive in... 🧵(1/X)

Here is my best guidance for action, rendered beautifully by the great John Lithgow. I first published these lessons more than eight years ago, in late 2016. They open the twenty chapters of "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century." snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-les...

In a time when many folks are looking for work, this is a great opportunity for an experienced HR professional to step into a critical senior role in an internal NGO with a diverse set of partners and donors. Please share with your networks! www.linkedin.com/feed/update/... #jobopportunity #globalHR

How is everyone doing with the end of Skype? Do people even use it still? We're moving everything to Teams (were going to do that anyway), but I was wondering what happens to all those contacts and conversations. Not that important, really just feeling nostalgic already.

📢 IPA is at #CIES2025 in Chicago! We’re diving into education, tech, and scaling impact across 7 panels this week. Who’s around today? 👋 Let’s connect and talk evidence, education, and impact. Full schedule 👉 bit.ly/IPACIES25 #GlobalDev #Education

Question re:changes in the funding landscape... When a research funder says they do not pay indirect costs or they limit indirects to 10%, how do you all recover the costs of your projects? Or do you take a loss? Or do you bypass organizational controls? Seriously, how do you do it?

Dean Karlan's job at USAID was LITERALLY to improve the efficiency of its programs. DOGE is clearly not actually after cutting fraud and waste. And its actions will clearly make the US weaker while also making the world a worse place. www.npr.org/sections/goa...

Has anyone bothered to download content from the USAID DEC (Development Exchange Clearinghouse)? Obvsly it's gone.

IES is the best federal research program I know. They strategically invest in the whole pipeline of research from description, to intervention design, to piloting & eval of promising designs, to scale up & eval of promising pilots, then dissemination & commercialization.

The Institute of Education Sciences, created by an Act of Congress in 2001 is being dismantled by DOGE. It includes the National Center for Education Statistics, which is how we track progress and funds rigorous research on education interventions' cost effectiveness. 50 states can't do that

Hearing from a govt contractor that Dept of Education is terminating What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) contracts. WWC is a website that rigorously evaluates education policies, programs, and products to determine what's effective and not. It's an invaluable tool for school, district, state leaders

Interactive map of USAID agriculture cut impacts on farms, ports across the US storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/29fc...

I hope statistical agencies don't start deleting things with the word "bias"

Curious how many mothers and children worldwide will die from slashing USAID programs? We'll never know, because we're gonna stop counting.

If I were an international aid donor I'd seize the opportunity to support dozens of shovel-ready projects that are designed, staffed, and ready to go.

All U.S. foreign aid is being reviewed to see if it is efficient, benefits American taxpayers, and makes America strong.

A diamond-mine for empirical economists sorting through the modern differences-in-differences literature Five years of teaching materials from frontier researcher @pedrosantanna.bsky.social, which he has very generously posted open-access in this #EconSky thread

Sincere question for my academic friends. When publishing a peer reviewed paper, is it necessary to thank anonymous referees? I see this a lot. "We thank X, Y, Z, and two anonymous referees." Referees always deserve thanks. Does it accomplish anything to publicly thank people you can't name?

Interesting reading about standard meta-analysis and #Bayesian methods to reproduce similar results: here (rworks.dev/posts/meta-a...) and here (github.com/WinVector/Ex...) #R #rstats #statistics #metaanalysis

I'm reading power analyses included with RCT design documents and really dislike the approach of citing earlier studies to justify an MDE. If you're doing policy research, it's better to say why a given impact magnitude is so small as to be ignorable. E.g. use the cost effectiveness threshold.

41st???

Interesting study on “merit” based teacher recruitment in Colombia. Raises many questions. Many answered in the paper but putting this on my list for a closer read.

Dean Karlan of USAID highlights when to do an impact evaluation versus when to simply monitor versus when to do A/B testing.

Ok, this needs a lot of tweaking and more work, but here's a minimal viable product for An econometrics paper (Deep Neural Networks for Estimation and Inference) 1. paulgp.github.io/2024/11/06/r... An economic theory paper (Targeting Interventions in Networks) 2. paulgp.github.io/2024/11/06/r...

Many of us routinely register our RCTs, but what about non-experimental impact evaluations? Isn't it even *more* important to commit to an analysis plan when the results are so dependent on analytic choices? Nice presentation by @tomdee.bsky.social... #openscience

Okay, I made an updated version of the guide "Python Packages for Applied Economists" to reorganize a bit, incorporate suggestions, and put it on Github like a grownup: github.com/clibassi/pyt... Comments welcome!

How can researchers write accessible summaries of academic papers? After editing ~350 @voxdev.bsky.social articles, I hopefully have something useful to say. Here are the key takeaways from editing first drafts of academics trying to write for policy audiences 🧵 1/10

Inspired by @dmckenzie.bsky.social's World Bank Researchers starter pack. I've created a starter pack for researchers within the J-PAL, IPA, and CEGA networks go.bsky.app/GXq3VE5 As the name suggests, it's just a start. Space to add more!

It cites a Miguel Garcia-Perez paper I haven't read yet. All of his work is incredibly meticulous!

I’ve trained so many wonderful students in data methods If you are one of them and are looking to make change check out this thread

I started a starter pack for World Bank researchers. Let me know if I am missing you go.bsky.app/BWMsQG6

Interested in running lab in the field experiments with farmers? This paper has a lot of practical advice. 👀 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #devecon #labinthefield #agecon

🚨🚨Data science jobs at IPA!!🚨🚨 Apply your data science & engineering skills to problems of global poverty with more data than you can imagine. Seeking data scientists in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Mexico, or Colombia. poverty-action.org/data-scienti... poverty-action.org/senior-data-...