Author Archives: Jason Kerwin

There is a lot of bad research out there. Huge fractions of the published research literature do not replicate, and many studies aren’t even worth trying to replicate because they document uninteresting correlations that are not causal. This replication crisis … Continue reading →

I recently posted a working paper where we argue that appointments can substitute for financial commitment devices. I’m pretty proud of this paper: it uses a meticulously-designed experiment to show the key result, and the empirical work is very careful … Continue reading →

Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that the United States government should pay reparations to African-Americans for slavery and institutionalized racism. The essay is long and full of supporting evidence, and generally makes a strong case that the US government bears responsibility for … Continue reading →

That’s the title of my guest post on the World Bank’s Development Impact blog, describing my job market paper. Here’s a bit of the introduction: People are afraid of HIV. Moreover, people around the world are convinced that the virus … Continue reading →

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Fifteen years ago I was an undergrad physics major, and I had just finished a summer spent teaching schoolchildren in Tanzania about HIV. The trip was both inspiring and demoralizing. I had gotten involved because I knew AIDS was important … Continue reading →

Why would you ask your employer not to pay you yet? This is something I would personally never do. If I don’t want to spend money yet, I can just keep it in a bank account. But it’s a fairly … Continue reading →

Poor people often have trouble saving money for a number of reasons: the banks they have access to are low-quality and expensive (and far away), saving is risky, and money that they do save is often eaten away by kin … Continue reading →

Cash transfers are an enormously valuable, and increasingly widespread, development intervention. Their value and popularity has driven a vast literature studying how various kinds of cash transfers (conditional, unconditional, cash-for-work, remittances) affect all sorts of outcomes (finances, health, education, job … Continue reading →

Like most economists, I like to present my research using Beamer. This is in part for costly signaling reasons – doing my slides via TeX proves that I am smart/diligent enough to do that. But it’s also for stylistic reasons: … Continue reading →