David Roodman's Microfinance Open Book Blog

I've had no regrets since I left mathematics almost 19 years ago. My last memories of studying it are of sitting in a library at the University of Cambridge, staring at lecture notes full of lifeless equations, struggling and failing to care. But occasionally I read something that reminds me of the beauty that can be found in math, and of the remarkable power of formal analysis. Then I see again what once made her attractive to me, if you'll forgive the metaphor.

For Innovations for Poverty Action, Alex Bartik blogs enjoyably about why collecting good survey data is really hard:

Asif Dowla quotes my First Randomized Trial of Microcredit post and then asks a good question:

I have blogged about the power and limitations of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Overall, I am a believer. I think the question researchers impertinently ask practitioners—can we show statistically that microfinance is helping?—is worth asking. And non-randomized methods have largely failed to answer it with credibility. So in my view it was for decades essentially correct to say that we have zero solid studies of whether microfinance makes clients better off on average.