This post discusses our detailed examination (including, with help from the authors, reanalyzing raw data) of the Miguel and Kremer 2004 study on deworming (treating people for parasite infections) as a way to raise school attendance, and a followup study (Baird et al. 2012) on the later-in-life impacts. Our current #3 charity, SCI, focuses on…
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New Cochrane review of the effectiveness of deworming
Update 07/20/12: Miguel and Kremer (and others) have responded to the characterization of their 2004 study by the updated Cochrane review here. We find many of their responses to the Cochrane authors’ objections (which are distinct from our reservations) persuasive, especially regarding attrition and sample selection in the haemoglobin data and baseline school attendance data….
Giving cash versus giving bednets
We recently published a new review of GiveDirectly, a “standout” charity that gives cash directly to poor people in Kenya. As we were going through the process of discussing and vetting the new review, I found myself wondering how I would defend my preference to donate to distribute insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) against a serious advocate…
Millennium Villages Project
Several people have emailed us in the past few days asking about the new evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), published in The Lancet last week. It has received significant attention in the development blogosphere (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). The evaluation argues that the MVP was responsible for a substantial drop…
What I learned in my first 6 months at GiveWell
I started work at GiveWell six months ago, just a few weeks after graduating from college. I had been following GiveWell pretty intensely for more than a year, since I had gotten back from my own trip to India. During that time, I had become a little obsessed: I had read the entire history of…
Errors in DCP2 cost-effectiveness estimate for deworming
Two notes on this post: This post discusses flaws in a particular published cost-effectiveness estimate for deworming. It should not be taken as a general argument against deworming as a promising intervention, and it does not address various other publications on deworming including the 2003 paper by Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer. Prior to publication,…