Here's something interesting. Dean Karlan, who is leading a study of the impacts of microcredit delivered by the controversial Compartamos in Mexico, just asked for help in crowd-sourcing research questions and hypotheses.
Larry Reed of the Microcredit Summit Campaign has a letter to the editor in the Washington Post about my piece last weekend.
Following SOP at CGD, I have drafted a brief to accompany my forthcoming book, which is now expected out in January. (Here's an example of a finished brief, for Mead Over's new book on AIDS.)
And following SOP on this open book blog, I'm sharing the draft with you. I'd welcome comments.
I suppose it is a measure of the power of randomized trials (RCTs) that arguments about their pros and cons continue to ricochet in the blogosphere. A fortnight ago, Philip Auerswald at The Coming Prosperity posted under the title, "Why Randomized Controlled Trials Work in Public Health...and Not Much Else." He elicited a high-quality comment stream.
In her invariably delicious prose, Kim Wilson sums up the Pitt-Khandker debate:
Dear Reader:
What part of “Y*i1 = Ziπ+ε1i where Yi1 = Y*i1 if Y*i1 >; Yi1 = c if Y*i1 ≤ c and Y2i = Yi1δ + ε2i” do you not understand?
Last Friday, I convened a small meeting of peer reviewers of my book. Turns out getting busy experts to review a 100,000-word manuscript isn't easy, which made invited reviewers more numerous than actual reviewers and made me all the more grateful to the latter. Beth Rhyne came in person, as did my boss Nancy Birdsall; Rich Rosenberg and Jonathan Morduch joined by Skype.
When the now-dominant methods of microfinance were developed circa 1980, they were what economists call technological breakthroughs. Although they were low-tech in the everyday sense of the word---involving meeting in person, paying in cash, keeping records on paper---they were nevertheless new ways to extract more value from a given amount of labor and capital. Well, not all new: as usual, innovation combined old ingredients in new ways and contexts.
