David Evans
daveevansphd.bsky.social
David Evans
@daveevansphd.bsky.social

Economist at the Center for Global Development. Formerly: Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank, RAND Corporation, & my local movie theater. I mostly share about international development research plus books and movies. Views mine, not my employer's. .. more

Education 40%
Computer science 27%
Pinned
Violence against students in schools is a major problem around the world. We have the data to show that.

But most education systems don't have the data to see if they're making progress in reducing violence, nor to pinpoint who is perpetrating violence. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

With The Running Man movie coming out, I recommend the low-budget, indie take with a related premise I saw the other night: Self Reliance. www.imdb.com/title/tt2608... Great fun, great cast: Jake Johnson, Andy Samberg, Anna Kendrick, Natalie Morales...

Corrected proofs submitted!

(The up-to-date working paper version is available now www.cgdev.org/publication/...)

What drove poverty changes in Latin America & the Caribbean over the last decade?

documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/0...

Employment and earnings growth: 37 percent

Public transfers: 23 percent

(Data from 13 countries)

Getting implementation right: 12 experiments to refine tutoring at scale www.wwhge.org/wp-content/u... Evidence from Botswana by @noamangrist.bsky.social, Cullen, & Magat

Reposted by Todd Pugatch

Can anyone point me to documented examples of country governments doing content-knowledge assessments with teachers?

I've seen analysis from regional tests (eg nicspaull.com/wp-content/u...) & from the World Bank's service delivery indicators (eg tessabold.com/uploads/7/0/...). Others?

This weekend is the North East Universities Development Consortium conference. It's a great program: neudc2025.com/program/ We'll have a round-up of the papers related to human development a few days after: education, early childhood, health, social safety nets, plus a few more.

To put that in the context of some other professional development studies in low- and middle-income country environments, check out our review. academic.oup.com/wbro/article...
"The intervention raised the pass rate in the national exam that determines progression from elementary to secondary school from 51% to 75%." drive.google.com/file/d/1aclW... Big substantive and persistent effects from a teacher professional development intervention in Uganda.

Simple pleasures: I love it when conference put your name on both sides of the name badge so I don't realize after an hour that I'm flashing a blank badge to the world.

I love the captcha that Letterboxd gives before you post a review of Bugonia.
We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

Thanks to @anamibanez.bsky.social for sharing over on the other site!

This collection of studies on inequality in Latin American and the Caribbean, now in a special issue of Oxford Open Economics, is excellent!

lacir.lse.ac.uk/en-gb/the-vo...

Deployment of health workers, rather than shortages, may be among the principal challenges. academic.oup.com/heapol/artic...

I loved this movie.
I am once again saying we must watch Pig (2021). "Every day you'll wake up, and there'll be less of you... we don't get a lot of things to really care about in this world."

youtu.be/s3CDAs2hkQc
That Restaurant Scene from PIG (now on Netflix) David Knell as Chef Finway - Entire Scene
YouTube video by David Knell
youtu.be

Reposted by David K. Evans

Despite evidence that letting pregnant girls stay in school doesn’t raise teen pregnancy rates, Catholic schools in the Congo have imposed a ban.

@daveevansphd.bsky.social & @leecrawfurd.bsky.social warn of the costs: worse employment, wellbeing & more. Read on:
https://bit.ly/3Kq77lm
Catholic Schools in the Congo Ban Pregnant Girls
Almost everywhere, girls who get pregnant in school are allowed to finish their education. Only five countries still have explicit bans or restrictions: Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Kuwait, a...
bit.ly

We began this work while we were all at the IDB. We seek to complement the excellent and extensive work being done by other organizations, like the World Bank and CEPAL.

[end of thread]

There are twice as many findings and much more nuance in the paper. Obviously, there is lots of variation across and within countries. (The paper shows much of the former; the latter we leave for country-specific studies.)

Finding E: The non-poor are five times more likely to be in formal employment than the extreme poor and twice as likely as the moderate poor.

Finding D: The poor are much less likely to have a computer but not much less likely to have a mobile phone. (This has implications for how you deliver information!)

Finding C: Poverty has dropped by roughly half since 2003, with almost all of that improvement in the first ten years.

Finding B: On average, 88 percent of households in extreme poverty were also chronically poor.

Finding A: Afro-descendants, Indigenous people, and children are all between 11 and 15 percentage points more likely to be poor than the overall population.

Our goal in this article is to give a *big picture* characterization of poverty in the region. This descriptive analysis may be useful for targeting efforts and for generating hypotheses for poverty reduction that can be tested causally.

"Ten Findings about Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean" www.cgdev.org/publication/... Forthcoming in *Economía* and now available as a @cgdev.org working paper, by Chang, @Caro_Curasuui, and me.

I'll give away five of the findings below.

Nuance to the benefits of teacher coaching: particularly good for novice teachers (unsurprisingly) and for students who are girls academic.oup.com/wber/article...

Reposted by David K. Evans

I am once again saying we must watch Pig (2021). "Every day you'll wake up, and there'll be less of you... we don't get a lot of things to really care about in this world."

youtu.be/s3CDAs2hkQc
That Restaurant Scene from PIG (now on Netflix) David Knell as Chef Finway - Entire Scene
YouTube video by David Knell
youtu.be

Running is definitely not for everyone!

On my side, I don't enjoy cycling or swimming very much.

It's nice to find some activity one can enjoy.

How much of the gap between household incomes and the poverty line do cash transfers close? On average across 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries, just one third. publications.iadb.org/en/cash-tran...