One of the richest graphs in development economics: 1. Minimal learning gain 2. Vast disparity in within-grade knowledge (imagine teaching this class!). 3. Nobody at grade level in math, few in language. From "Disrupting Education," by Muralidharan et al. pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10…

🤷🤷‍♀️New data: SHRUG 2 is out!! Development Data Lab has been working on this for two years, a HUGE update to India’s coolest data platform: 1. Maps of *every* 2011 town and village, with ids 2. All data at every geography (villages, districts, ACs, etc)... devdatalab.org/shrug 🧵1/N

1/ What is the value added of local democracy? Fascinating paper by Vijayendra Rao and colleagues on a natural experiment in India: Local democracy aligns spending more closely with citizen preferences, but these gains accrue more to advantaged groups. documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099…

New paper with Vijayendra Rao and Aditya Chhabra in which we find that using Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Llama in social science research might lead to serious biases! arxiv.org/pdf/2309.17147… (1/6)

stubthestubble.com is a first step toward a comprehensive set of solutions for farm fires that many of us keen on public problem solving have been working on. Many planned expansions to the platform are underway, and our work will soon be open-sourced!

"Using Large Language Models (LLMs) for Qualitative Analysis Can Introduce Serious Bias," a new World Bank working paper with Julian Ashwin & Aditya Chhabra documents.worldbank.org/en/publication… Extends our work on Large-N Qual Analysis blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluati… A thread on the *new* paper👇

All I want for Christmas is a staggered intervention panel data set with fairly large N (say, U.S. counties), not-so-large T, and decent pre-intervention controls. A limited dependent variable would be a nice stocking stuffer. For the record, I've been pretty nice. 😬

First video from Saroja.Earth, part of a series of short videos condensing years of research and conversations with scientists and policy professionals on air pollution reduction in North India: youtu.be/eR3j5YP7p1k?si… Please share far and wide!

Very glad that the idea of using qualitative interviews to understand mechanisms has entered the top-5 Econ universe. Here are the other ways in which economists can draw on qualitative insights (the paper also reviews earlier work on mixed method RCTs): documents.worldbank.org/en/publication…

men will literally use python subprocess to pass an in-memory sqlite database to R (with pre-processing in sql) and then call ggplot2 on that data rather than learn matplotlib github.com/expectedparrot…

New World Bank paper from Siddharth George, Vijayendra Rao & M.R. Sharan reviews the history of panchayats, analyzes the empirical literature on decentralization in India, and proposes policy reforms for the future documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099…

Brilliant work.

Hi #econtwitter folks, can you link me to (any) resources/compilations of resources for first year econ PhD students?

This article by Khanna, kanika mahajan & Sudarshan RSA examines the efficacy of a 2015 ban on crop residue burning across five states. It finds that the ban had a sizeable ⬇️ impact on fire counts - w/ a lag of a year and effects lasting for at most two years ideasforindia.in/topics/environ…