Causal Design & Mercy Corps Partner to Investigate Cash Transfers in Humanitarian Response Last year Causal Design partnered with Mercy Corps to investigate the impact of various operational models for dispersing cash grants after a natural disaster. Specifically, we wanted to see if the frequency of cash disbursements, offering of financial literacy training, or sending reinforcing voice messages had […]
Introduction It is often the case in Impact Evaluation that we have a need to analyze binary, qualitative variables such as savings behavior (saves vs. does not save), voting behavior (votes vs. does not vote), or gender (male vs. female). In general, we are interested in whether a condition exists or does not exist, rather […]
Managing multiple editors in STATA: For this week’s blog post, it seems useful to cover some code I’ve learned for Stata. This first useful trick allows multiple users who are going to use the same dofile to run that file without having to first customize the filepath code. By copying the individual usernames and filepaths […]
We work with clients who are running poverty interventions in the field. These are not experiments – where the program is designed around an experiment – these are impact evaluations that have to be designed around a development program that has already been designed or is in progress. As such, often times the sample size […]
Many users of Stata looking to visualize statistics opt to output results into MS Excel via commands like -tabout-, -putexcel-, and -outreg-. While Excel offers an intuitive and comprehensive way to create summary tables, it lacks the professionalism of tables commonly found in published journal articles. These tables can be created using Latex, and fortunately, many Stata packages have Latex functionality. This article is a tutorial on how to use Stata’s -tabout- command to create publishable and client-ready tables in Latex. It assumes the reader has a good grasp of Stata and -tabout-, but no knowledge of Latex. The tutorial is not intended to teach general Latex, but only enough Latex to take advantage of Stata’s output commands.
May has already been a month of significant transition (More updates to come!). Unfortunately, we are saying farewell to Kevin Kelsey this week. Kevin was our first research analyst, and his shoes will be hard to fill. While on our team, he made substantial contributions to our evaluations of Mercy Corps’ TabangKO (Philippines) and INVEST (Afghanistan) programs. […]
With the steady rise of the number of impact evaluations (IEs) per year, it should come as no surprise that not every single IE will show a positive impact. The authors of “no impact” evaluations will understandably be worried that their work will not be academically published nor be used for public policy. There is, however, still value in such information. Evidence that a particular program does not work paves the way for alternative interventions to happen. Licona (2017) provides several examples where null results in Mexican education programs encouraged the tweaking of aspects such as selection criteria, consolidation of redundant programs, and budget optimization.
On a recent project, the client wanted an idea of the skew of each of a large number of variables. The data originated from a satisfaction survey (1=very dissatisfied; 5=very satisfied). On our Excel presentation sheet, we were to choose from the following options to describe the population’s view regarding each variable: right-skewed (generally very dissatisfied), left-skewed (generally very satisfied), U-shaped (most were either very dissatisfied or very satisfied, with few being neutral), or normal-shaped (most were neutral, with few being either very dissatisfied or very satisfied).
With support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, IDinsight published a 3ie Working Paper on the “Future of Impact Evaluation.” We really like the team over at IDinsight and think they are spot-on with this work. Causal Design’s primary focus is on providing decision-focused evaluations like they describe in the paper. Their main arguments are listed […]
I was just forwarded a Bloomberg article by a good friend along with a note that she finally understood -kinda- what it is we do. Many, my own family included, believe that economists spend their days coming up with theoretical models for what could happen in the market. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to explain […]
