Professor Rebecca Thornton from Baylor University will be presenting at the Joint Seminar in Development Economics. Don’t miss Dr. Thornton’s talk “Scaling-Up an Education Intervention: Experimental Evidence on Program Effectiveness, Exposure, and Sustainability” on Monday, November 7th starting at 11:00 AM in Savery 410!

Brief Description of the Paper:

Conventional wisdom suggests a tradeoff between program effectiveness and scale: programs implemented at larger scales utilize lower-quality inputs and tend to achieve smaller impacts. This paper isolates the effects of increased scale per se by disentangling scale-up from changes in input quality. We use data from an RCT that compares a literacy program to both a control group and a reduced-cost variant designed to emulate how education programs are typically scaled up. The reduced-cost version cuts back on the quality and quantity of teacher training, which is one of the most-important and most-expensive inputs provided by the program. We contrast this reduced-cost version with how the program’s impacts change when it was actually scaled up by 230%. Cutting back on the quality and quantity of training causes large declines in the effectiveness of the program, but scaling up the program has little impact on its effectiveness. We also compare sustainability of the program and can compare how multiple student exposure affects long-run effects with how program effectiveness fades for teachers.

CSDE Affiliate Nora Kenworthy and co-authors have published the paper “Struggling, helping and adapting: Crowdfunding motivations and outcomes during the early COVID-19 pandemic” in Sociology of Health and Illness. The study utilizes mixed methods research to analyze data of 919 US GoFundMe campaigns over the first 7 months of the pandemic. What an incredibly interesting paper! Congrats Nora, a must read!

CSDE Affiliate Isabelle Cohen recently discussed her recent work on improving tax compliance in a low-capacity environment with the Uganda Revenue Authority at a webinar hosted by Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Mindlab, Pakistan’s first behavioural insights unit on Thursday, Nov 3^rd at 6:30 AM. Check out the link here for a Facebook  replay of her talk.  Exciting to see Isabelle bringing her work to new audiences around the globe!

CSDE Affiliate Mary Kay Gugerty and co-authors Lehn Benjamin and Alnoor Ebfrahim recently published an article in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ), “Nonprofit Organizations and the Evaluation of Social Impact: A Research Program to Advance Theory and Practice.” The article connects the fields of nonprofit studies and evaluation to develop a research program intended to support nonprofit leaders to productively engage in evaluation as well as to advance a meso-level theory of nonprofit evaluation that recognizes the diverse ways nonprofits contribute to social change. Great job Mary Kay and team!

Congrats to CSDE Affiliate Rachel Fyall and co-authors on their new piece in Nonprofit Voluntary Sector Quarterly(NVSQ), “Exploring Nonprofit Advocacy Research Methods and Design: A Systematic Review of the Literature.” It is a really smart piece and is a wonderful example of collaboration across our school’s community.

CSDE Affiliate Crystal Hall gave the keynote address at the Big Difference BC Conference on Friday, November 4^th where she spoke about her work around behavioral science and anti-racism. The focus of this year’s Big Difference BC conference is on how behavioral science can be deployed to have a positive, lasting impact across a wide range of topics and sectors in British Columbia. Congratulations Crystal!

CSDE Trainee Callie Freitag recently received a research grant from the Center for Financial Security (CFS) at UW-Madison, that supports her dissertation research and is connected to her participation in the Junior Scholar Intensive Training program at CFS last summer. The grant will support dissertation work examining how the employment histories and population characteristics of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipientsvary depending on when in the life course they first receive SSI. Congratulations Callie!!!

CSDE Trainee Will von Geldern has been awarded a Tier 1 pilot grant from the Population Health Initiative (PHI) for a qualitative study of home kitchen enterprises – one of nine projects funded this round. Will is a PI on this PHI grant, with support from Evans faculty Heather D. Hill and Epidemiology faculty Anjum Hajat. Congratulations to Will on this award, the intellectual work it reflects, and the community connections he has built!  Huzzah!