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There has been a lot of talk about unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) lately. An awful lot in the wake of the release of Haushofer and Shapiro’s findings on GiveDirectly in a policy brief (pdf) earlier this month.

In short, Haushofer and Shapiro find that GiveDirectly’s cash transfers (i) allow poor households to build assets, (ii) increase consumption, (iii) reduce hunger, (iv) do not increase spending on alcohol and tobacco, (v) increase investment in and revenue from livestock and small businesses, and (vi) increase the psychological well-being of recipients and their families.

These are all good things, and I look forward to the replication studies that will tell us when and under what conditions UCTs work.

(Matt Collin has a very nice post on UCTs here, in which he adds the caveat that just giving cash will not solve the coordination failures leading to the underprovision of public goods in many developing countries. Likewise, David McKenzie goes into detail about the strengths and weaknesses of Haushofer and Shapiro’s study in a post on the World Bank’s Development Impact blog.)

A few weeks ago, I presented my paper with with Tara Steinmetz on female genital cutting (FGC) in The Gambia at the 2013 RECODE conference at the University of Ottawa, which was superbly organized by my Ottawa colleagues Alberto Chong, Fernanda Estevan, Louis Hotte, and Christopher Ksoll.

As a result of the comments I have received there and elsewhere, the paper has changed considerably, and it is about to change even more. Still, I thought I’d share the slides of my presentation given that my blog has had many visitors interested in FGC over the weekend. You can find my slides here (link opens a .pdf).

From a similarly titled post by Dave Giles:

1. Always, but always, plot your data.
2. Remember that data quality is at least as important as data quantity.
3. Always ask yourself, “Do these results make economic/common sense”?
4. Check whether your “statistically significant” results are also “numerically/economically significant”.
5. Be sure that you know exactly what assumptions are used/needed to obtain the results relating to the properties of any estimator or test that you use.
   Continue readingTen Things Applied Econometricians Should Keep in Mind