Thrilled to be joining @nber.org as a Research Associate in the Economics of Education! I got to present our new work on reading in Ghana at the spring program meeting yesterday—amazing audience & questions as always.

My Duolingo streak is now a decade old!

Dear development economists: stop writing a ton of extra stuff in your PAP, and just tell me what analyses you are going to run

Development Impact is featuring my fantastic coauthor Monica Lambon-Quayefio! Amazing to see all the cool stuff she is working on.

Team "Elsevier Highlights Subversion" strikes again! Best one yet! @deankarlan.bsky.social, Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Utsav Manjeer, @christopher-udry.bsky.social

Johannes Haushofer@johanneshaushofer.com · last yr.

Remember the "Highlights" that some Elsevier journals require? Dean Karlan and friends developed an amazing way to troll them: haikus!

Happy birthday to @audreydorelien.bsky.social, the most beautiful & amazing woman I’ve ever met.

Also over on Twitter ("X") we are in day two of a debate about the value of RCTs in education research. Lots of value over at the bad place! That's where the people who disagree with me are.

Jason Kerwin@jkerwin.bsky.social · 8mo ago

In an A/B test we found that training principals to coach teachers in their schools improved teaching quality by 24 percent! These results are still tentative—but good enough for our implementing partner to keep running this intervention.

In an A/B test we found that training principals to coach teachers in their schools improved teaching quality by 24 percent! These results are still tentative—but good enough for our implementing partner to keep running this intervention.

Innovations for Poverty Action@poverty-action.bsky.social · 8mo ago

What’s the most scalable way to support teachers? New evidence from Ghana suggests training school leaders as in-school coaches—supported by simple edtech—can significantly improve teaching quality. Read more on early results from an A/B test with Inspiring Teachers: bit.ly/4qgPy6R

Re-upping my advice about how to write a good title and abstract for an academic paper, appropriately called: "How to Write a Title and Abstract" Feel free to share this thread, which will focus on titles. #EconSky #AcademicSky

Last Thursday I gave this quarter's Paul Heyne Seminar. My talk was about why USAID is great for America and also the world, why we should keep it, and how we can make it even better. A key point is that it is the best brand in the industry, by far.

Hey remember when everyone in econ was doing flowcharts (“directed acyclic graphs”) for like three weeks? That was fun.

What happened to USAID is now slated to happen to the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC): www.mcc.gov What I am hearing is consistent with these screenshots! 😤😤😤 The dismantling of US Foreign Aid continues…

Esteban J. Quiñones, Ph.D.@estebanjq.bsky.social · last yr.

What can you do about the assault on USAID? Share this far and wide. Do your part! Please do retweet 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

The #PAA2025 Karaoke session is no joke! @jkerwin.bsky.social you would have loved this.

A remedial education program in India worked well when teachers were given strict implementation guidelines. It worked just as well when teachers had discretion to adapt. www.nber.org/papers/w33242 by Beg, @annefitz13.bsky.social, @jkerwin.bsky.social, @profalucas.bsky.social, & @kwrahman.com

There are a lot of interesting details for scholars to explore about basically everything, but for practitioners you get the most value out of the basics: — Moderates do better at elections — Free trade makes most people better off — The past was poorer

One more incredibly creative protester ... #HandsOff #SaveOurDemocracy #LFG

🆕 People think it’s easy to contract HIV. That might not be a good thing. Today on VoxDev, @jkerwin.bsky.social (@uwnews.bsky.social) discusses how providing information on actual (often lower) HIV transmission rates helped curb risky sexual behaviours in Malawi: voxdev.org/topic/health...

People think it’s easy to contract HIV. That might not be a good thing.

Despite the high HIV prevalence in Malawi, individuals do not seem to adjust their behaviour to avoid infection—this may be due to the perceived transmission risk being so high that people become fata...

voxdev.org

Here are updated forms for Federal Cuts Tracker Map project, live later this week 🙏🏼 Help share and crowdsource!!! www.linkedin.com/posts/abigai...

Abigail André on LinkedIn: #data #federalgovernment #federalworkers #usaid #noaa #federalcuts #stories | 21 comments

Here are updated forms for Federal Cuts Tracker Map project, live later this week. If you're new to the project, it is an interactive map that is tracking… | 21 comments on LinkedIn

linkedin.com

All of us owe an enormous debt to the late Susan Watkins, who was the godmother of social science in Malawi. She was an incredible mentor to me. None of this exists without her.

Jason Kerwin@jkerwin.bsky.social · last yr.

Awesome to be featured back-to-back with these other results. Rebecca Thornton was my advisor and the MDICP (now MLSFH) laid the foundation for basically all social science research in Malawi, including mine. I built on their work in innumerable ways.

In light of recent cuts to global HIV programs like PEPFAR, today on VoxDev, we are featuring not one, but two, research studies on HIV prevention in Malawi—both of which touch on fatalism: the belief that contracting HIV is inevitable, leading individuals to engage in riskier sexual behaviour. 1/3

I just heard from someone that used this paper in a class they teach. Yay! "How Big Are Effect Sizes in International Education Studies?" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/...

Knicks up by 22, Hawks call timeout to discuss the fact that the other team seems to be scoring a lot more than they are.

I don’t think “academia is extremely left-wing” and “academia is full of people who find Matt Yglesias unacceptably right-wing” are actually competing hypotheses at all.

Hakeem Jefferson@hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · last yr.

Yglesias types once felt they had the upper hand in political discourse. Now that others—often unlike them—take up space and tell the truth about their politics, it’s suddenly “academic social science is just ideological.” No, you’re just being challenged.

USAID is an incredible brand and source of soft power. Killing it off would be a disaster for US foreign policy and for millions of the world’s poorest people.

All probationary federal employees at NOAA’s EMC that’s responsible for keeping all US weather model systems running have been fired with 1 hours notice. And that includes me and colleagues. We will not go quietly because we care about the NOAA mission to protect the public.

Your slides should avoid having tons of extra junk on them, but the default Beamer themes make that hard. So I made my own .sty file that fixes all the standard issues and put it on my website for everyone to use:

I'm so thrilled to share that I'll be starting as Associate Professor in the Economics department at Macquarie University's Business School in May. Excited for this next step and very much looking forward to getting to know my new colleagues 😊

Are you picking controls for your RCT based on which variables have "significant" differences in your balance table? Don't do that.