Enjoyed the presentation by @elianalaferrara today at World Bank DIME of work joint with Baumgartner, Rosa-Dias, Breza and my awesome coauthor Victor Orozco: evidence around a peer education program targeting early sexual activity teen pregnancy in Brazil.
The authors have a fascinating evaluation comparing a peer educator program with three alternate selection mechanisms for educators (school-driven; selection via peer nomination of popularity; selection by centrality in a formally mapped network) to a control arm.
In general, the peer education program is very effective: ⬆️ knowledge and communication around sexuality, contraceptive use; ⬇️ teen pregnancy. The peer educators chosen by schools (the default method), however, were generally ineffective!
Meaningful treatment effects are driven by the arms in which popular or network-central adolescents were peer leaders. Fascinating look at an important topic; many programs (for youth + adults) rely in some way on peer leadership, but selection method rarely carefully examined.
The default is usually to accept volunteers or leave it up to authorities (like schools) who might impose their own, not necessarily well-informed criteria. This evaluation provides strong evidence that's suboptimal.
Just realized @vicorozc is on twitter. Awesome paper!

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More from @leightjessica

25 Jun
As new PhD students start to look forward to their first year, short 🧵 on challenges in collaboration in grad school (and its potentially gendered dimensions).
Many people advise grad students to rely on their classmates: first in coursework, later on projects / as coauthors.
I endorse that advice! But it can also be hard to follow. I attended two grad programs (MPhil and PhD) and had similar experiences in both. There were large, energetic, overlapping-networks problem set groups that formed quickly.
They were mostly dominated by men (unsurprisingly; econ grad programs are mostly dominated by men) and, to describe it neutrally, had a fast-paced style. Always an introvert who was becoming more so, I was uncomfortable and anxious about trying to participate.
Read 13 tweets
8 Jun
So much of what we hear around RCTs are exciting stories about how evidence is used to inform policy. Which is awesome! I love evidence-informed policy. However, I'm sure many of us have also had experiences that are different, and more challenging.
In the spirit of transparency, wanted to share some different (anonymized) stories about use of evidence. Short 🧵
#1: program has mixed effects (largely null for downstream outcomes). Funding for the implementer concludes, implementer and funder move on. What happens? Brief discussion, draft paper shared (0 replies), almost no policy learning (hopefully research community benefits).
Read 11 tweets
3 Jun
Lately I’ve been thinking more and participating in various conversations about how USAID commissions, uses research. Huge topic! But wanted to do a short🧵on what I’ve learned. 1/n
First and foremost in the hearts of most economists is DIV. DIV is awesome, as many others have pointed out! See this recent blog by @DaveEvansPhD and colleagues 2/n
cgdev.org/blog/case-evid…
But, DIV primarily funds evaluation of pilots and other interventions that are implemented outside of USAID and are not directly related to the work of missions – as summarized above (there are some exceptions). In that sense it is often separate from the main aid portfolio 3/n
Read 15 tweets
1 Jun
After doing a lot of reformatting to meet a journal page limit (which, TBC, I support), I started to wonder - why don't journals impose limits on the referee reports that lead to these long papers? E.g., 1-2 pages; or alternatively, 3-5 (choose N) substantive suggested revisions
Seems like this could help with a lot of problems - long review times, tedious revisions, bloated papers that are hard to read, indigestible appendices, etc. Hard to enforce, but editors could suggest that material beyond the limit would be ignored.
Plus, I suspect many referees would be very happy for explicit guidance that allows for coordination, since (many of us) are concerned about the perception of submitting an un-thorough or low-quality report relative to others. . .
Read 4 tweets
3 May
Happy to see the latest JEP table of contents and took a look at the @bfjo paper on teamwork right away (h/t @jenniferdoleac). Really fascinating and some striking graphics on the rise of teamwork in econ; short 🧵 #EconTwitter
On a subfield note, was very surprised to see development was significantly under the average for team size in the 1980s, though it has now converged up. Anecdotally it seems like much larger teams (5+, 10+) starting to surface in dev, still rare in the profession at large
Also a thoughtful discussion of questions about credit, attribution and equity. Lots of evidence already that some team members (particularly women) receive less credit than others, e.g. Sarsons et al.
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…
Read 4 tweets
12 Apr
New week, new twitter project! In recent years more and more randomized trials have analyzed interventions targeted at non-cognitive skills (soft skills, life skills, socio-emotional skills) broadly defined in developing countries. 1/n
This is a major interest of mine – I’ve decided to start a running thread quickly summarizing and linking to papers of interest. Please add links to other papers, including your own – I’ll add them. 2/n
Two today. First, Acevedo, Cruces, @paul_gertler, and Martinez analyzed a soft skills and vocational skills training program in the DR. Targeted skills include grit (perseverance, ambition) and social competencies (leadership, conflict resolution, social skills, empathy) 3/n
Read 55 tweets

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