My new short paper "If it needs a power calculation, does it matter for poverty reduction" is now up at World Development, free at this link authors.elsevier.com/a/1aE3l,6yxDAY…
It is part of the special issue discussing RCTs following the Nobel prize 1/13 I discuss what types of anti-poverty policies can one learn about through simple before-after comparisons and just "seeing whether something worked" as @DaniRodrik argued happened with Chinese reforms; and when are detailed power calculations and RCTs etc needed 2/13

I'm about halfway through Banerjee and Duflo's Good Economics for Hard Times, and thought I'd reflect on the quite stark difference in the way they think about migration versus trade 1/21 A first point is to note that the book is written in a very easy to read format, and weaves together large amounts of the literature into a nice coherent viewpoint (each chapter has ~90 references!). The target reader is largely a rich country citizen worried about the world 2/21