Conner Mullally

I've only been an editor for one month and I've already encountered several papers with made up citations, a sure sign of AI abuse. Authors: editors check your citations when looking for potential referees (at least I do), and fake references are a quick route to desk rejection.

Visual Inference and Graphical Representation in Regression Discontinuity Designs Despite the widespread use of graphs in empirical research, little is known about readers' ability to process the statistical information they are meant to convey ("visual inference"). We study visual...

Found it: arxiv.org/abs/2112.03096

There was a paper a few years ago, I think, that talked about how it is difficult to visually detect significant treatment effects in RDD analysis. Does anyone remember which paper I'm talking about? #econsky

How To Write the Abstract of Your Development Economics Paper Last year, I claimed that you win or lose readers with the introduction of your economics paper. That might have been generous. A lot of people will read no further than the abstract of your paper to ...

I'm revising the abstract of one of my papers, so naturally I'm re-reading my evidence-based post on how to write an abstract. www.cgdev.org/blog/how-wri...

When sharing is not caring: Knowledge Hoarding as a Barrier to Agricultural Innovation. Guest post by Luisa Cefala.

Really interesting job market paper around why farmers may be reluctant to share knowledge around adopting specific agricultural technologies: blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

New paper! We study the impact of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on local conflict (2005–19). District level DiD analysis shows the PSNP reduced civil unrest by nearly half, mainly during the 2014–18 protest wave, with no significant impact on violence. doi.org/10.35188/UNU...

Opinion | What Republicans and Democrats Get Wrong About Crime An evidence-based approach to criminal justice would tell us that policing works and long prison sentences do not.

Evidence-based policy >> fundamentalist conservative or progressive beliefs

www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/o...

Hard to overstate how revelatory this paper was for me — one takeaway I had from it was "small fixed costs can really deter people from optimizing."
Which made me think about a few other recent papers where fixed optimization costs are a key ingredient:

The better the journal, the longer the appendix?

Climate, crops, and postharvest conflict I present new evidence of the effects of climate shocks on conflict. Focusing on political violence in Africa, I find that El Niño Southern Oscillation shocks during the crop-growing season affect ha...

The climate–conflict nexus is an active area of research. I examine how El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) shocks affect political violence in Africa. Headline result: Exposure to a positive ENSO shock (an El Niño event) reduces postharvest conflict. [1/13]
doi.org/10.1111/ajae...

The 22nd Midwest International Economic Development Conference (MWIEDC) will be held at UIUC March 28–29, 2025. Co-hosted by Ag Econ and Econ. Mushfiq Mobarak @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social keynote. Always one of my favorite conferences.
Deadline for submissions Jan 8, 2025.

How to ask better research questions:

• don’t ask if the coefficient is different from zero. Think about the variation it can explain
• ask things you don’t know; rather than confirm something you already believe
• look for “tension”: the opposing of countervailing economic forces

Today is the launch of the IDB’s flagship DIA (Development In the Americas) report: “Expanding Opportunities: Policies for Gender Equality and Inclusion” publications.iadb.org/en/expanding... are 10 of my favorite figures/tables. 🧵

Question about std errors:
In an RCT, treated people are randomly assigned to "pods" and interact (e.g., treatment = WhatsApp group membership). The norm (e.g. Cai-Szeidl) is to cluster on indiv for control group + on pod for treatment group. Why is clustering needed if any ICC is due to treatment?

Trying something new:
A 🧵 on a topic I find many students struggle with: "why do their 📊 look more professional than my 📊?"

It's *lots* of tiny decisions that aren't the defaults in many libraries, so let's break down 1 simple graph by @jburnmurdoch.bsky.social

🔗 www.ft.com/content/73a1...

Okay, I put some of my thoughts on the not-so-junior market down to organize my thoughts (still a work-in-progress). These are just talking points, but I think they stand alone. I’ll elaborate on this at some point, but curious if this stimulates conversation… 📈📉

docs.google.com/presentation...

The department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at Ohio State is hiring! We have a very well-resourced endowed chair available at either the Associate or Full Professor rank, 50/25/25% research/teaching/outreach, working on economics of "rural and urban interface”.

What's the best descriptive paper you've ever read? For me it's probably this one. Teachers in Uganda were missing from the classroom *half* the time! Stunning.

documents1.worldbank.org/curated/zh/8...