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I’ve been in India a few days now and the jet lag is mostly faded. It’s about right now (noon), when my body says it’s 3am! WTF are you doing awake? Much less working?! that I start to fade and I get a bit nauseated before I bounce back and out of it. I swear this was easier when I was younger.

I’ve spent the last few days reconnecting with Delhi in unexpected ways. My hotel this trip is in Green Park, a stone’s throw from where I spent two months in 2008. So yesterday I went to visit Evergreen sweet shop and sat under the freezing cold air conditioning with a cup of masala chai at the Cafe Coffee Day. Or the Barista. Or one of the other myriad essentially identical coffee shops in Delhi that serve super sugary American-style drinks and pastries. 

This is how you get sick, by the way. You go out, it starts raining, you sweat trying to get inside, so you’re wet from the rain and from sweating and then you sit under air conditioning that even a penguin would feel chilled by and voila, monsoon virus! Or something like that. I think that’s how it goes.

What else? I had lunch at a friend’s house, whose sister I know from graduate school, and got a hot-oil head massage, which did an awesome job of clearing the jet lag fog. Hmmm, perhaps I need another one of those. I’ve been trying to get some exercise and yesterday found myself in Deer Park, still in my kurta and leggings, having switched out my sandals for tennis shoes, speedwalking around the park before dark. I’ve become one of those ladies. (See, #oldandtired, I couldn’t even be bothered to change!)

At any rate, tomorrow (Thursday) is our BCURE policy dialogue on Economic Growth and Environmental Protection at the University of Chicago Center in Delhi. I’ll be tweeting about it and I’ll write more about it later, but BCURE is one of the big initiatives that EPoD has in India and Pakistan and is expanding (I think) to countries around the world. It’s a really cool program to partner with governments and civil society organizations on their data and program evaluation needs, connecting needs with creative minds. I’m excited to see how it works.

I’m starting a new project where I need women’s labor force participation rates in the 50s and 60s in America. In particular, I need them disaggregated by state, race, and year. I have a few solutions, but would be very excited if anyone could offer others.

Here is what I know exists:

• FRED has LFP for women for the whole country from 1948 to present
• IPUMS has a representative sample of microdata that I can aggregate up to the level I need (from 1952 onward, I think)

My students live-tweeted a seminar last week at Lafayette College. I was pretty stoked on it, so I made my first Storify to commemorate it.

I’m fascinated by how my students are using twitter in the classroom this semester. We’ve had some great conversations about everything from the national debt to finance to how to use Stata. I think it will only get better as the semester goes on. You can check out the conversations at #lafecon213 and #lafecon365.

One of the resounding themes of this morning’s plenary at the SVRI Forum is how to deal with high standards for statistical significance in extremely complex, sometimes dangerous and impoverished communities. In particular, the presentation on SASA!, a GBV intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa, tried to show very large effects of their program with a very small sample size and very little statistical significance. Charlotte Watts discussed at length how we shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater” and how if we’re missing statistical significance by “a hair’s breadth,” we shouldn’t ignore the results.

It grated on me that the discussion took this particular path because I think there is a large opening for those doing research to examine the different ways that we use and examine quantitative evidence, but most involved still heavily relied on the semantics of statistics. There is a strong argument for mixing qualitative and quantitative research. Each method can uncover patterns and trends and events that are not evident in the other, and qualitative work can provide justification for small-scale quantitative work with small sample sizes or insufficient power. I don’t think this is the only way of dealing with the problem, however.

We know that RCTs are expensive. Lori Heise, of the London School of Tropical Medicine, made an excellent point that if RCTs are the standard, there has to be more funding and recognition of that from the donor community.

There’s a lot of work and questioning to be done around this issue. Just because there is not sufficient power or sample size to find a statistically significant effect, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask the question, but it does affect how we can present the results. And presenting the results as of a particular magnitude (especially when that magnitude is large), just identifying that it matches the expected direction is not really sufficient and worse, perhaps disingenuous.

The end of the semester is almost upon us and I can’t wait. I have so many new books and things I want to read over the holidays. Of course, I probably won’t manage to read everything as I also have the goals of getting two papers out, and I will have to prepare classes for next semester, and have do that little look-for-a-job thing, but here’s at least a preliminary list:

1. The Cloud Atlas(I tried to start over Thanksgiving and got distracted, but I hear such great things)
2. Order without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes(h/t @mfbellemare)
3. The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family
4. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
5. Any really beautiful novel. Suggestions?

Don’t forget to vote today! For those in PA, remember that they can ask you for your photo ID, but you don’t have to provide it (unless you’re voting at a particular location for the first time–but even then, it doesn’t have to be photo ID, just the voter registration card they sent you in the mail.)

I didn’t get a sticker. So I’m just making sure to say it loud and clear here: I voted!

Thanks to those who came before me who worked so I (and others) have this right.

 

I am a Labor Economist with interests in gender, families, and violence. I am currently in a visiting position at Gettysburg College and am on the 2012-2013 Economics Job Market. I will be attending and available for interviews at the ASSA/AEA meetings in January in San Diego, California. More information about me and my research, including current CV, can be found on my economics blog and personal website.

My short course this week at CU’s pop center was incredible and exhausting and incredibly exhausting. The easiest part, for me, was thinking about spatial models using matrix algebra, if that’s any indication of what we did all week. I’m fairly certain I forgot how to write STATA code and learned just enough R and GeoDa to be dangerous, but you can bet that’s not the last of me.

Next week should bring to fruition ideas and blog posts that have been percolating: teen pregnancy, more spatial econometrics (separately, although, that gives me an idea…), and some 1720s finance, as well as back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Have a safe and happy holiday weekend!