Agricultural Economics—Without Apology
(HT: Ami Shah, Janet Hou, Anu Dathan, and Gabe Power.)
From a recent NBER working paper by Banerjee et al.:
We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous variation in the importance (in a network sense) of the people who were first informed about the program, “the injection points”. Microfinance participation is higher when the injection points have higher eigenvector centrality. We estimate structural models of diffusion that allow us to (i) determine the relative roles of basic information transmission versus other forms of peer influence, and (ii) distinguish information passing by participants and non-participants. We find that participants are significantly more likely to pass information on to friends and acquaintances than informed non-participants, but that information passing by non-participants is still substantial and significant, accounting for roughly a third of informedness and participation. We also find that, conditioned on being informed, an individual’s decision is not significantly affected by the participation of her acquaintances.
The emphasis is mine, for those of you who want the news they can use.
I have not yet had a chance to read this paper, but I believe it is part of a trend away from pure impact evaluation and toward the investigation of causal mechanisms — the key words in the abstract being “structural models of diffusion.”
Krugman on Scientific Publishing and the Peer Review Process
So now we have rapid-fire exchange via blogs and online working papers — and I think it’s all good. Work circulates even faster than it did then, there are quick exchanges that can advance understanding, and while it’s still hard to break in, connections aren’t as important as they once were and the system is much more open.
But, you say, doesn’t this allow a lot of really bad economics to circulate? Yes, but is it really any worse than it used to be? As I’ve tried to explain, the notion of journals as gatekeepers was largely fictional even 25 years ago. And I have a somewhat jaundiced view of how the whole refereeing/publication system has ever worked; all too often, it seems to act as a way for entrenched doctrines to blockade new ideas, or at least to keep people with new ideas from getting tenure at a good school.
The major problem I see now is the disconnect between promotion and the real nature of intellectual discourse in the Internet age. But the quality of the discussion, it seems to me, is if anything higher than it was in the good old days.
That’s Paul Krugman, in a post commenting on the trend toward open science, which the New York Times discussed earlier this week, and which my colleague Don Taylor blogged about yesterday.