IMPACT
Advancing the Research Agenda for Financial Inclusion
The World Bank recently
published the recap of a June 2016
workshop exploring the path toward broader global financial inclusion. This one day event, co-hosted by CEGA and the World Bank, drew together nearly 200 people from academia, financial sector, government, and nonprofits to set a research agenda. The event also featured talks by multiple CEGA affiliates on how governments in low-income countries can effectively support financial inclusion goals.
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IN THE NEWS
CEGA Postdoc Highlighted by Discovery Channel
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Kweku Opoku-Agyemang |
CEGA Postdoctoral researcher
Kweku Opoku-Agyemang
was featured on the Discovery Channel's
Seeker Daily program
in an episode titled, "Can Africa Overcome Its Corruption Problem?" In the episode, Opoku-Agyemang discusses a study of whether increased salaries for police officers can curb bribery in West Africa. The
study
finds that following a salary increase for police officers in 2010, police bribes actually grew by 25%.
Measuring Progress towards Development
 A
Forbes
article this month highlights takeaways from a CEGA
conference
on the use of sensor networks (IoT), satellite imagery, and other technologies to monitor the economic performance of infrastructure investments in the developing world. Co-hosted by the World Bank's Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) group, the meeting's participants included researchers from
Facebook,
Planet
, and a host of other companies and universities working to improve transport systems, utilities, and rural infrastructure. Presentations and videos are
online.
The Science of Scaling
Scale was the focus of this year's
State of the Science
conference, held in September by CEGA's
Development Impact Lab.
Speakers included academics from the CEGA network as well as staff from USAID, J-PAL, IPA, Evidence Action, and IBM Research Africa. The event was designed to explore how we can learn more systematically from the scale-up of anti-poverty products and interventions.
Devex
highlighted the
top takeaways
from the conference.
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SPOTLIGHT
BITSS Awarded NIH Grant
Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences
(BITSS) been awarded a
$250,000 grant
from the National Institutes of Health for a series of international Research Transparency and Reproducibility Training (RT2) events over the next five years. These events will bring together leading academics to identify common challenges in the practice of science, develop and disseminate new tools, and train the next generation of social scientists in reproducible, transparent research. Partners include UC Berkeley, Stanford University, UCSF, UC Riverside, and the Center for Open Science.
Launching CEGA's New Economic Development and Institutions
(EDI) Program
 A
recent video
details how the
Economic Development and Institutions
(EDI) program, jointly managed with Oxford Policy Management, will generate a set of "linked" randomized evaluations that result in high-quality evidence with greater generalizability. The program, funded by UK Aid, will shed light on how to improve political and legal institutions across a diverse range of geographies and contexts.
CEGA 2015-16 Annual Report
 CEGA's 2015-16 annual report is now available on our
website.
The report explores CEGA's evolution over the past year, highlighting the research, initiatives, and individuals that help us achieve impact throughout the world.
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PEOPLE
CEGA Welcomes New Affiliates
Several new faculty affiliates have recently joined CEGA:
Siwan Anderson (University of British Columbia),
Supreet Kaur (UC Berkeley),
Simeon Nichter (UCSD),
Molly Roberts (UCSD), and
Charles Sprenger (UCSD). These outstanding researchers bring expertise in big data analytics, political economy, behavioral economics, and labor markets.
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RESEARCH
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Photo by Andrew Weller |
Early Childhood Development: From Science
to Scale
Failing to invest in early childhood development can have lasting effects on health and wellbeing into adulthood. CEGA affiliates
Lia Fernald
and
Paul Gertler
(UC Berkeley) are co-authors on a
three paper series in the Lancet
providing a comprehensive investigation of early childhood development. They estimate that 250 million children under five in low and middle-income countries are at significant risk of not reaching their development potential. The three papers review interventions that have proven effective and provide a roadmap for scaling up solutions, and estimate the costs of inaction.
New Insight into Climate Change Impacts
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Photo by Kenneth Lee
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The environmental risks of climate change are well studied and documented - but the likely social and economic impacts have been less extensively investigated. In a
new paper in Science
, CEGA affiliate
Solomon Hsiang
and co-author Tamma Carlton review quantitative estimates of the impacts of environmental change on health, agriculture, economics, conflict, migration, and demographics. Their analysis reveals that rising temperatures have increased the risk of conflict by 11% in Sub Saharan Africa; decreased the amount of North American maize by 48%; and could slow global economic growth rates by nearly a third of a percent per year if continued at the current rate.
Mapping Crop Yields with Satellites
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Photo by BRAC
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CEGA affiliate
David Lobell
recently discussed his work on satellite crop mapping at
Google Earth's Engine User Summit.
High resolution remotely sensed imagery can be a powerful and low-cost tool for estimating crop yields and measuring the effectiveness of agriculture interventions in small-holder farming communities.
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OPPORTUNITIES
Registration Now Open for BITSS Annual Meeting
Call for Papers: PacDev 2017
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