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Chris Blattman

@cblatts

25 Feb

@HarrisPolicy

The pandemic changed a lot of teaching for the worse, but I wanted to tweet how it spurred me to try to change the way we teach international policy and development @HarrisPolicy.

In short, we took the opportunity to try to get policymakers all over the world to teach classes.

@BusaraCenter

One of the classes I'm most excited about is led by the staff of @BusaraCenter, a behavioral laboratory in Nairobi. A range of East African researchers, faculty, and Busara VP @mschomerus are leading a class on behavioral research and economics. Students will run real studies!

What I liked the most is the theme Busara proposed -- representational and diversity issues in development, and what it means to be running research when there's such a power differential. So a quant class with meaningful anthropology, psychology, etc baked in. It's amazing.

Read 25 tweets

Chris Blattman

@cblatts

5 Feb

Here's a story of unintended consequences, of academic theories and government policy gone wrong, of how damn hard it is to tackle organized crime, and of insights into what criminal organizations really want and do.

It starts in Medellin.

[Paper: osf.io/preprints/soca…]

First thing you need to know: Every low and middle income neighborhood in the city has a neighborhood gang called a combo. We did a census of them. Here's how it looks. Every square inch is claimed by one combo or another.

This is valuable territory. There's a healthy retail drug market. They make and collect loans. Some even run local monopolies on staples like arepas, eggs, yogurt, and cooking gas in neighborhoods like this.

Read 25 tweets

Chris Blattman

@cblatts

5 Feb

[Continued from previous thread]

When we left off, we were talking about what happened when states try to improve governing in underserved neighborhoods. Here's a "caravana" they held in each neighborhood, alongside the liaisons, where all agencies comes out to the sector.

After two years of intense state governance, relative state went down!!

Note: when we launched this with the city, we expected crowding out, and never expected the "crowding in" effect to dominate.

Now, to be clear, we don't see clear evidence of a rise in absolute levels of combo rule. There are some signs that the state struggled to deliver, and that decreased people's happiness with the state. But even where it worked well: no evidence of crowding out!

Read 15 tweets

Chris Blattman

@cblatts

4 Dec 20

https://twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1334835463002218499

it’s great that economists do lots of field work and interviews now. But think of the absolute sloppiest, terrible causal inference paper you can remember, from someone who doesn’t even know that they don’t know what they’re doing.

That’s how economists do qualitative research.

https://twitter.com/besttrousers/status/1334835463002218499

We can probably do better. We shouldn’t expect most papers to do better than that. But surely some papers should?

What percent? Even 1% using qualitative work to motivate a theory or understand the results of a program evaluation would be more than happens

Often these are econ-ethnographer partnerships. Some good collaborations I can think of:

Morduch and Rutherford and coauthors on financial diaries

Levitt and Venkatesh on Chicago gangs

Anything with Ensminger

Read 12 tweets

Chris Blattman

@cblatts

1 Oct 20

OK who wants a thread on why gangs rule? Not why gangs are great. I mean, when and how do they govern civilians.

Here we are meeting one gang leader who, besides running the drug trade, has built this crafts school behind him, a recycling center, and a community pool.

This isn't a slum. It's a middle income neighborhood in Medellin, Colombia. Nearly every low- and middle income neighborhood in the city has a resident gang called a combo.

We spent 4 years interviewing dozens of members and leaders of 31 criminal groups.

@SantiagoTobon

Here's a map of the city. We also surveyed 7000 people on what services state and combos provide. Medium & dark red indicate a combo intervenes in disputes, crime, and disorder more than the state.

(By we I mean @SantiagoTobon @BigBigBLessing & @gusduncan with @poverty_action)

Read 17 tweets

Chris Blattman

@cblatts

24 Sep 20

As the school year kicks off & grad students start signing up to see profs, here are some thoughts about planning your research.

To me, the 2 questions PhD students ought to ask themselves:

1. How will this research change people's beliefs?
2. Who are those people?

These are probably the two questions I ask students again and again, and it leads to better research.

This is certainly true with empirical research. Students are consumed with credible causality. So they get really excited when they think about a way to identify something.

But often, others already buy their hypothesis. So the study is unlikely to change beliefs. Sure we might learn something from checking. But a study, or at least a dissertation, needs to have a big ex-ante capacity to surprise us or change our minds about something important.

Read 10 tweets

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