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How reliable is survey data on personality traits from low- and middle-income countries?
Last week in the Weekly Links, David McKenzie shared a new paper recently published in Science. The paper, by Laajaj et al., examines the validity of quantitative measurements of the “Big 5” personality traits (e.g., openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability) in developing countries. Here is the punchline:
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MidDev 2019 Recap
Over on the Economics that Really Matters blog, I’ve written a recap post on a subset of papers from the 2019 Midwest International Economic Development Conference (MidDev). The post is titled: “The Economics of Violence, Conflict, and Crime in Developing Countries.”
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Aspirations and Real Estate Investment in Rural Myanmar — New Working Paper
Aspirations, or future-oriented goals, influence how we make choices in the present. In recent years, development economists have developed a particular interest in the way aspirations influence human behavior. The figure below plots my calculation of the number of published articles that mention “aspirations” cataloged in the EconLit database from 1956 through 2016.
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Why Good Policy Requires Responsible Communication and Consumption of Research
Over on the Shared Justice website, I (with Katie Thompson) wrote a piece on responsible communication and consumption of research. We focus this post on the recent dust-up with respect to research into the welfare effects of participation in payday lending. Here is an excerpt:
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The Causes and Consequences of Conflict and Violence
Over on the (always excellent) Economics That Really Matters blog I (with Heidi Kaila) recapped all of the papers related to conflict and violence at the 2019 Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) Conference.
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How to Assess “Economic Significance”
Back in 2015, I read a book by Morten Jerven, in which the author makes the point that over 145 variables have been found to be statistically significant explanatory variables for long-run economic growth. Morten’s point is more nuanced than this, but this suggests that when interpreting regression results we need to not only consider…
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My #OxCSAE2019 Recap
Over the past weekend, I was able to attend the 2019 Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) Conference at the University of Oxford. Established in 1096 the University of Oxford is the oldest English-speaking university in the world. Walking around the campus is inspiring, but even more inspiring than that is the work…
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New Website Features (!)
Those of you who have previously visited my blog may notice that there are several new features on this website. These changes are necessary partly because this website began as a travel blog during my senior year in college while I was studying at the University of Ghana. (For those interested, check out some of…
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Top Posts of 2018 (and Happy New Year!)
This is the sixth year of this blog. As I mentioned last year, I started blogging when I was in college and studying abroad in Ghana. Somehow that feels like a lot longer than six years ago.
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Max Weber and the (so-called) Protestant Work Ethic
It is about time I wrote about this topic on this blog. The Freakonomics podcast ran an episode last week entitled, “Is the Protestant Work Ethic Real?” The majority of the episode focused on research by Gharad Bryan, James Choi, and Dean Karlan evaluating the effects of a faith-based development program implemented by International Care…
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Jeffrey R. Bloem 