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Can Yelp Help Track Food-Borne Illness?

I have been working on a paper about food-borne illness lately, and one of the things I have learned is that for a specific outbreak of food-borne illness to show up in the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) data, the stars need to be properly aligned.

Specifically, you have to get sick enough that you see the doctor about it. Then, upon determining that your illness was food-borne, your doctor needs to notify the health authorities of the county you live in. Finally, the health authorities in your county need to notify the CDC. So necessarily, the CDC data on food-borne illnesses is an undercount, and just how systematic is this undercounting varies by state… which poses a number of econometric problems for this researcher.

Who Was the First to Use Randomization in Development Economics, and When?

If you answered “Probably Esther Duflo, sometime in the early 2000s?” just as I did, you were wrong, just as I was.

As it turns, Immink and Viteri were the first to use randomization in a two-part article (part 1 is here; part 2 is there) testing the efficiency wage hypothesis published in the Journal of Development Economics in 1981: