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Andy de Barros

@andydebarros.bsky.social

https://de-barros.com/ program evaluation, education policy, development economics · almost done thinking...

66 Posts998 Follower572 Folgt
Cyrus Samii@cdsamii.bsky.social · last mo.

Excellent post. The “reflective” vs “formative” distinction is one I’ve tried to make in the past but not nearly as eloquently. And the fact that Anderson’s ICW index can dampen power by upweighting noise is an important problem that should be better understood.

David McKenzie@dmckenzie.bsky.social · last mo.

In today's blog, @brucewydick.bsky.social discusses what factors you should consider when aggregating variables into an index - and how to use indices to measure abstract concepts like aspirations, empowerment, and social cohesion blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

Andy de Barros@andydebarros.bsky.social · last mo.

2026 econ-of-ed / human-capital papers in top-5 journals + AEJ Applied/ReStat/AER Insights with evidence from non-high-income countries. Other journals missing here, obv. I count 9 published, online, or forthcoming papers so far. Short thread. What am I missing?

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NBER@nber.org · last mo.

Studying how parents may invest differently across children by compensating the disadvantaged child or by reinforcing the child with higher expected returns, from Barrera-Osorio, Bonilla-Mejía, Busso, Galiani, Kang, Muñoz-Morales, and Pantano www.nber.org/papers/w35375

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Andy de Barros@andydebarros.bsky.social · 2mo ago

𝗡𝗲𝘄: A gov't-led socioemotional support program in middle schools did not improve socioemotional skills, but nonetheless: Repetition ⬇️, select science and language scores ⬆️ "Developing Socioemotional Skills in Early Adolescence" de-barros.com/publication/... w/ Campos, Glewwe, Kumar, and Lépine 💪

Developing Socioemotional Skills in Early Adolescence: Experimental Evidence from Morocco's Public Schools | Andreas de Barros

We investigate a government-delivered socioemotional support intervention in Morocco's public lower-secondary schools. The intervention trained existing school social specialists to deliver small-grou...

de-barros.com

Aaron Ainsworth@ajainsworth.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Excited to see our study on four-day school weeks and teacher retention out at Education Finance & Policy! Using 18 years of data from Oregon, we find that switching to a four-day week actually increased teacher turnover by about 2 percentage points. direct.mit.edu/edfp/article... 1/4

Less Is More? The Causal Effect of Four-Day School Weeks on Teacher Turnover

Abstract. The use of four-day school weeks (4dsw) in the United States has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. Previous work examines the impact of 4dsw on student outcomes, but less research ...

direct.mit.edu

AEA Journals@aeajournals.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Forthcoming in the AER: "The Effect of Omitted Variables on the Sign of Regression Coefficients" by Matthew A. Masten and Alexandre Poirier.

The Effect of Omitted Variables on the Sign of Regression Coefficients

(Forthcoming Article) - We show that, depending on how the impact of omitted variables is measured, it can be substantially easier for omitted variables to flip coefficient signs than to drive them to zero. This behavior occurs with “Oster’s delta” (Oster 2019b), a widely reported robustness measure. Consequently, any time this measure is large—suggesting that omitted variables may be unimportant—a much smaller value reverses the sign of the parameter of interest. We propose a modified measure of robustness to address this concern. We illustrate our results in four empirical applications and two meta-analyses. We implement our methods in the companion Stata module regsensitivity.

aeaweb.org

J-PAL@j-pal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

New research alert! Here’s the big idea: Will giving students the tools to master foundational math and reading skills serve as a building block for broader learning? @andydebarros.bsky.social & Theresa Lubozha set out to answer this by examining Zambia’s national “Catch Up” program.

Eva Vivalt@evavivalt.bsky.social · 6mo ago

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/ 🧵

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Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 6mo ago

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.

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.
Andrei Munteanu@andrei-econ.bsky.social · 6mo ago

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):

andrei-munteanu.com

Seema Jayachandran@seema.bsky.social · 7mo ago

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!

Weiss Fellowship for Junior Researchers in Low- and Middle-Income Countries - Weiss Fund

The Weiss Fund Fellowship provides supplementary financial support for exceptional job market PhD candidates accepting positions in Weiss Fund-eligible countries and doing work aligned with the Weiss ...

weissfund.uchicago.edu

NBER@nber.org · 7mo ago

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

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