What's "the next-generation evidence agenda for the global school meals community"? www.cgdev.org/blog/global-... Bedasso & Bundy take a stab at it.

R&R received! #GetYourManuscriptOut #GetYourManuscriptBack

Remember that whole year you had to have Piketty on your coffee table to be accepted in polite society? COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/unread PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

I'm very much looking forward to this knowledge exchange on teacher preparation and development in early November! lnkd.in/ezbBnMjb Expressions of interest by Monday (September 15)!

When children age out of childcare in Peru, their mothers' mental health declines. repositorio.pucp.edu.pe/server/api/c...

I continue to be struck by the degree of heterogeneity in development economics courses! This is from coding "over 200 courses in 56 developing countries and the United States." documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/6... from @dmckenzie.bsky.social & Paffhausen

How to Publish Statistically Insignificant Results in Economics blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva... Still a challenge!

Many interventions “work” in small trials but fail at scale Also, EdTech often promises much, but delivers little In a new paper (bit.ly/3JKLgVn) @karthik-econ.bsky.social & I show how personalized adaptive learning (PAL) software can sharply improve learning outcomes at scale🧵1/16

As students across the globe return to classrooms, @daveevansphd.bsky.social suggests three movies highlighting the importance of teachers in LMICs: 🎞️ Radical (2023) 🎞️ Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (2019) 🎞️ Rule Breakers (2025) More on the movies: https://bit.ly/3JFWFG3

For back-to-school season (in many countries), I share three movies about great educators in low- and middle-income countries. www.cgdev.org/blog/three-m...

"Estimating treatment-effect heterogeneity across sites, in multi-site randomized experiments with few units per site" papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I agree 100% with @sonnybunch.bsky.social's (almost entirely positive) assessment of the movie Honey, Don't!: "funny, clever, well-acted, and genuinely subverts the expectations of audiences"

Putting the Trump pocket rescission of US$4.9 billion in international assistance funding into context! www.cgdev.org/blog/pocket-... from @ecollinson.bsky.social & Estes @cgdev.org

In many countries, spending on education has dropped in recent years. How can education systems mobilize more resources AND use the resources they have most effectively? publications.iadb.org/en/smart-spe... New report full of practical examples. Available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Are there systematic diagnostics to decompose how much of the variance of a coeff is due to (unmodeled) heterogeneous effects vs sampling error? Intuitively, seems like there are ways to get at it, e.g., compare variance of outcomes in treat vs control group to gauge heterogeneous effects.

3 reasons to skip a baseline survey in your impact evaluation econweb.ucsd.edu/~kamurali/pa... from Karthik Muralidharan

I'm putting together a talk on a new applied micro paper, and I'm reminded that (I believe) it's very hard to outperform the structure proposed in this piece by Jesse Shapiro. shapiro.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/file...

It's great to see Mendez Acosta's and my work discussed at the Association for Education Assessment in Africa annual conference. Here's the presentation from Professor @annieoc.bsky.social www.facebook.com/watch/live/?... Here's our paper academic.oup.com/jae/article/...

A friend asked me about whether there was any issue with publishing a working paper and then splitting it into multiple papers for journal publication. (It's for institutional reasons.) I'd think not, but anyone have experience (positive or negative) with this?

Valuable exchange on #cashtransfers New paper on cash transfers & child survival in Kenya www.nber.org/papers/w34152 Berk Özler examines blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva... Caitlin Tulloch (Give Directly) replies www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

Remember: violence in school isn't a reason to keep kids out of school. Out-of-school kids usually experience *more* violence, not less (www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....). It *is* a reason to make schools safer!

Javier Bardem explaining calibration? Yes please. from the excellent 2021 film The Good Boss / El buen patrón

Violence in and around schools is all too common. It's even worse against children with disabilities. www.cgdev.org/blog/three-l... @gsmarrelli.bsky.social and I reflect on lessons from a recent systematic review (by Eldred and others) of school-based interventions.

Paper rejected! #GetYourManuscriptOut #GetYourManuscriptBack #AllPartOfTheProcess

"Many facilities are barely staffed, and effective staffing levels fall further when adjusted for health worker absences." academic.oup.com/heapol/artic... Human resource challenges in health systems in 10 African countries

Most of the excellent 2016 movie Shin Godzilla (letterboxd.com/daveevans/fi...) focuses on political process (not the monster): How does a massive government bureaucracy mount a disaster response to an unprecedented threat? A nail-biter on realistic bureaucratic infighting? Yes please!

I love that so much attention is going to making sure children master literacy & numeracy in the early grades! But we can't forget the kids who need later remediation. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1... This study substantively boosts literacy & numeracy among secondary school students.

Working papers get a lot of attention and journalists don't scrutinize the evidence. I do that here for the most recent cash transfers and infant mortality paper... Is the effect that big? How can spillovers be so important (and work so fast)? Do forking paths affect the findings? And more...

In Chile, a program to encourage high school students to become teachers via WhatsApp counseling is trying out an AI chatbot to facilitate scaling. blogs.iadb.org/educacion/en... Early analysis shows interesting differences in how students interact with human vs AI counselors.

Households with intersex members (representing nearly 3 percent of Chile's population) have substantively lower incomes than those without. Previous work shows "significant workplace rejection and discrimination." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... by @ercio.bsky.social et al.

In Colombia, as girls' education levels passed that of boys, more girls said no to relationships (unions or marriages)! read.dukeupress.edu/demography/a... It *also* became more common for women to marry men with less education.

Research from @leecrawfurd.bsky.social finds that ten year olds who score well in reading and maths go on to earn roughly 11% more as adults.💡 Explore the economic returns to foundational learning in his analysis of data from Indonesia ⬇️ bit.ly/4lZgpCm

Many thanks to donors who are funding this important resource, the Demographic & Health Surveys: "Several donors & host countries are funding the completion of selected surveys.... also received a 3-year grant for Emergency Support to Stabilize the DHS Program from the Gates Foundation."

What are your favorite examples of quantile regression in impact evaluation papers? (Self-promotion welcome but not required.)

Paper submitted! #GetYourPaperOut

Students can't learn at school if they don't show up. I love this piece showing how 5 school systems are tackling absenteeism. (We can't build rigorous evidence of what works if people aren't innovating and experimenting!)

Last night I saw Rumours, a bonkers, hilarious movie about the leaders of the G7 wandering through an apocalypse, trying to draft a statement from their summit. No better group to watch this with than a bunch of international organization veterans.

In Uganda, girls with disabilities reported experiencing sexual violence at nearly twice the rate of girls without disabilities. A lot of it is happening at school. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

School feeding program in Rwanda yields 11x return on investment academic.oup.com/jae/article-...

My teenager and I saw this fun movie at the theater. A father seeks to protect his zombie daughter from society. I laughed a lot, I cried a little, what more could I ask? (It maybe could have been a *little* shorter. I could ask that. But overall it was a complete win!)

I really liked this book! Difficult to pigeonhole into a genre, bold plot choices, strong characters. The audiobook rotates among four excellent narrators. bookshop.org/p/books/shar...

Last week at a team retreat at @cgdev.org, we were recapping examples of impact from CGD education work, and at some point someone asked: But can you name an impact NOT linked to Justin? (I promise we had some, but the fact that someone had to ask the question points to Justin's outsized impact.)

People with different needs will require different levels of support to get out of poverty. publications.iadb.org/en/adapting-... I love this work from Monica Pinilla and others on how to think about that for people with disabilities.

¡Mira, mamá! ¡Alguien inteligente leyó mi artículo de investigación! (Aquí el artículo: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...)

Article submitted! #GetYourPaperOut #AgainAndAgain

@eeshani.bsky.social on populism and poverty! www.cgdev.org/blog/populis...

I'm increasingly sensing that the impacts of cash transfers are quite different in high-income countries. For employment effects in low- and middle-income countries, see Banerjee, Hanna et al. academic.oup.com/wbro/article...

"Although data recording systems regarding violence are important..., there are still many challenges to be faced that hinder a sharper analysis of reality." Goulart de Vargas et al. on school violence link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

"Effective policy tools hinge on accurately diagnosing this local context." osf.io/ghcpj/downlo... @chrisblattman.bsky.social on key factors for how to fight urban crime. I'm reminded of @rglenner.bsky.social & Bates' work on adapting evidence across places. ssir.org/articles/ent...