I've been a bad blogger over the past month or so, something I'm hoping to remedy over the coming weeks. (Somewhere out there, a behavioral economist is grumbling about me being present-biased and naive about it. Whatever, grumbly behavioral economist.) I'm writing this from SFO, about to head off to Bangalore (via Seattle and Paris, where I'll meet my coauthor/adventure buddy Louis), thanks to USAID and Berkeley's Development Impact Lab. We're hoping to study the effects of the smartgrid in urban India, as well as to learn more about what energy consumption looks like in Bangalore in general. There is a small but quickly-growing body of evidence on energy use in developing countries (see Gertler, Shelef, Wolfram, and Fuchs -- forthcoming AER, and one of my favorite of Catherine's papers! -- and Jack and Smith -- AER P&P on pre-paid metering in South Africa -- for a couple of recent examples). Still, there's a lot that we don't know, and, of course, a lot more that we don't know that we don't know. Thanks a lot, Rumsfeld.
Feeling SSMARTer already!
In other exciting news, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) has released its SSMART grant awardees - and my new project (with Matt and Louis, and overseen by Catherine) on improving power calculations and making sure researchers get their standard errors right has been funded! Very exciting. Check out the official announcement here, and our page on the Open Science Framework here. Since this is a grant explicitly about transparency, we'll be making our results public as we go through the process. Our money is officially for this coming summer, so look for an update / more details in a few months.
Where we are currently: there are theoretical reasons to be handling standard errors differently than we currently are in a lot of empirical applications, and there are also theoretical reasons that existing formula-based power calculations might be ending up under powered. In progress: how badly wrong are we when we use current methods?
My flight is boarding, so I'll leave you with that lovely teaser!