Keynote: ​Every Child Ready, Every Child Learning

Paul Gertler delivered the keynote speech at this year's Every Child Ready, Every Child Learning conference in Auckland, New Zealand March 5-7, 2018. Organized by the World Bank Group’s Education Global Practice, the conference brought together around 200 key stakeholders, including relevant ministries, development partners, researchers, and practitioners to discuss school readiness, early grades learning, and innovative financing.

New Published Papers

How to Make Replication the Norm (Nature) - Gertler and co-authors attempt to reproduce tables from studies published in economics journals with open data policies using publicly available data and code. Results and feasible policy recommendations ensue. 

The Half-Life of Happiness: Hedonic Adaptation in the Subjective Well-Being of Poor Slum Dwellers to the Satisfaction of Basic Housing Needs (Journal of the European Economic Association) - Gertler and co-authors use a multicountry field experiment to examine the impact on subjective measures of well-being of the provision of improved housing to extremely poor populations in order to test whether they exhibit hedonic adaptation when their basic housing needs are met.

Are There Synergies from Combining Hygiene and Sanitation Promotion Campaigns: Evidence from a Large-Scale Cluster-Randomized Trial in Rural Tanzania (PLOS One) - Researchers present the results of two large-scale, government-led handwashing and sanitation promotion campaigns in rural Tanzania, with the objective of tracing the causal chain from hygiene and sanitation promotion to changes in child health outcomes and specifically testing for potential interaction effects of combining handwashing and sanitation interventions.

Long-Run Effects of Temporary Incentives on Medical Care Productivity (American Economic Journal: Applied Economics) - Gertler and co-authors use a randomized field experiment conducted in Argentina​ to show that costs of adjustment as opposed to low perceived value may explain why improved quality care practices diffuse slowly in the medical industry.

Now Available: Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook (2nd Edition)

The second edition of the Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is now available. The handbook is a comprehensive introduction to impact evaluation for policymakers and development practitioners. The updated version covers the latest techniques for evaluating programs, with expanded case studies. Complementary online instructional material and course are available here. 

New Working Papers

Mortality from Nestlé’s Marketing of Infant Formula in Low and Middle-Income Countries - Gertler and co-authors estimate the impact of infant formula on infant mortality in low and middle-income countries. 

Aspiration Adaptation in Resource-Constrained Environments - Using a multi-country field experiment, Gertler and co-authors test the effect of a slum-housing intervention on the housing aspirations of non-beneficiary neighbors.
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Incentives for Replication in Economics - Gertler and co-authors examine why replication is so rare in economics and propose changes to the incentives to replicate.

Living Up to Expectations: How Vocational Education Made Females Better Off but Left Males Behind- Gertler and co-authors study the interaction between job and soft skills training on expectations and labor market outcomes in the context of a youth training program in the Dominican Republic.