Helping new immigrants find work: a policy experiment in Sweden
Despite the large and growing literatures on migration in economics, sociology, and other social sciences, there is surprisingly little work which actually evaluates the impact of particular migration...
View ArticleWhen Randomization Goes Wrong...
An important, and stressful, part of the job when conducting studies in the field is managing the number of things that do not go according to plan. Markus, in his series of field notes, has written...
View ArticleThe potential perils of blogging about ongoing experiments
One of the comments we got last week was a desire to see more “behind-the-scenes” posts of the trials and tribulations of trying to run an impact evaluation. I am sure we will do more of these, but...
View ArticleTips for Randomization in the Wild: Adding a Waitlist
This is a relatively small point, but one that has come up several times in conversations in the last few months, so I thought it worth noting here.Context: you are randomly selecting people for some...
View ArticleFrom my mailbox: should I work with only a subsample of my control group if I...
Over the past month I’ve received several versions of the same question, so thought it might be useful to post about it. Here’s one version:I have a question about an experiment in which we had a very...
View ArticleFrom my inbox: Three enquiries on winsorizing, testing balance, and dealing...
I’ve been travelling the past week, and had several people contact me with questions about impact evaluation while away. I figured these might come up again, and so I’d put up the questions and...
View ArticleWhat should you do when your random assignment gets compromised?
The New York Times recently had a piece on the retraction and re-issuance of a study in Spain based on a randomized trial of the Mediterranean Diet’s effect on heart disease. The original study was...
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