Author Archives: Jason Kerwin

WARNING: Malicious link in previous post (or, adventures in African computing). Cross-post from my other blog; both of these seem to have been compromised through my WordPress account.

Jason (that’s me) has just launched his own solo blog, Ceteris Non Paribus. I’ve got a post up explaining why I’m doing it, as well as my first real content. While I hope to continue making posts at ML occasionally, … Continue reading →

The development impact blog summarizes encouraging recent progress toward eliminating malaria. Regular readers will be aware of the growing body of evidence indicating that early-life malaria exposure significantly stunts education and wages for people’s entire lies. Thus this potentially huge … Continue reading →

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution links to a very compelling case for paying organ donors, made by Alexander Berger in a New York Times op-ed. The counter-argument has always been that this will lead to the exploitation of people, especially … Continue reading →

I overheard this story on the BBC radio news tonight: a group of women in Zimbabwe have been accused of committing a series of rapes against men in order to collect their semen for alleged “ritualistic” reasons. Apparently they meant … Continue reading →

There’s a piece doing the rounds on various media wires claiming that the Gates-funded Avahan program prevented a large number of HIV transmissions in India, reducing the prevalence of the virus by as much as 13% in Karnataka, the state … Continue reading →

Adam is optimistic about the spread of RCTs into economics, and (like most people in development) I share his optimism. But there is a strong resistance to the rise of experimental and quasi-experimental methods in economics. In development we mainly … Continue reading →

A new piece in the Lancet by Heffron et al. finds that hormonal contraception (specifically the injection-based method most common in sub-Saharan Africa) roughly doubles the risk of HIV transmission between an infected partner and an uninfected one. My first … Continue reading →

My colleague Adam rightfully approves of the spread of RCTs as a means of evaluating interventions, but raises a couple of important concerns about drawing inferences with them. His overall point about the generalizability of results is on point: especially … Continue reading →

Over at Development Impact, David McKenzie summarizes a new paper that looks at the external validity of field experiments by comparing the results of the same experiment run in different places. The logic is simple: use the results of one … Continue reading →