Jason Kerwin

Re-upping my advice about how to write a good title and abstract for an academic paper, appropriately called:

"How to Write a Title and Abstract"

Feel free to share this thread, which will focus on titles.

#EconSky #AcademicSky

A fun side note: the seminar is named in honor of the late Paul Theodore Heyne, who was a long-time lecturer at UW. He was one of the undergraduate advisors for Jeff Smith, who was one of my own Ph.D. advisors. Jeff now holds the Paul T. Heyne Distinguished Chair in Economics at (the other) UW.

Why USAID is Great for America and the World - Jason Kerwin Last Thursday I was invited by UW’s Economics Undergraduate Board to give this quarter’s Paul Heyne Seminar—a public lecture about economics aimed at a general audience. My talk was about why USAID is...

Here's a brief blog post about the talk: jasonkerwin.com/nonparibus/2...

And here are the slides: jasonkerwin.com/Slides/Paul_...

Comments welcome!

Last Thursday I gave this quarter's Paul Heyne Seminar. My talk was about why USAID is great for America and also the world, why we should keep it, and how we can make it even better.

A key point is that it is the best brand in the industry, by far.

The highly-touted flowchart revolution didn’t really pan out. Turns out that if you run a garbage can regression with a DAG you’re still just doing a garbage can regression.

Hey remember when everyone in econ was doing flowcharts (“directed acyclic graphs”) for like three weeks? That was fun.

What happened to USAID is now slated to happen to the Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC): www.mcc.gov

What I am hearing is consistent with these screenshots! 😤😤😤

The dismantling of US Foreign Aid continues…

poast pics

The #PAA2025 Karaoke session is no joke! @jkerwin.bsky.social you would have loved this.

A remedial education program in India worked well when teachers were given strict implementation guidelines. It worked just as well when teachers had discretion to adapt. www.nber.org/papers/w33242 by Beg, @annefitz13.bsky.social, @jkerwin.bsky.social, @profalucas.bsky.social, & @kwrahman.com

There are a lot of interesting details for scholars to explore about basically everything, but for practitioners you get the most value out of the basics:

— Moderates do better at elections
— Free trade makes most people better off
— The past was poorer

They're eating the checks, they're eating the balances. Sign held by a Bill

One more incredibly creative protester ...
#HandsOff
#SaveOurDemocracy
#LFG

People think it’s easy to contract HIV. That might not be a good thing. Despite the high HIV prevalence in Malawi, individuals do not seem to adjust their behaviour to avoid infection—this may be due to the perceived transmission risk being so high that people become fata...

🆕 People think it’s easy to contract HIV. That might not be a good thing.

Today on VoxDev, @jkerwin.bsky.social (@uwnews.bsky.social) discusses how providing information on actual (often lower) HIV transmission rates helped curb risky sexual behaviours in Malawi: voxdev.org/topic/health...

Abigail André on LinkedIn: #data #federalgovernment #federalworkers #usaid #noaa #federalcuts #stories | 21 comments Here are updated forms for Federal Cuts Tracker Map project, live later this week. If you're new to the project, it is an interactive map that is tracking… | 21 comments on LinkedIn

Here are updated forms for Federal Cuts Tracker Map project, live later this week

🙏🏼 Help share and crowdsource!!!

www.linkedin.com/posts/abigai...

All of us owe an enormous debt to the late Susan Watkins, who was the godmother of social science in Malawi. She was an incredible mentor to me. None of this exists without her.

In light of recent cuts to global HIV programs like PEPFAR, today on VoxDev, we are featuring not one, but two, research studies on HIV prevention in Malawi—both of which touch on fatalism: the belief that contracting HIV is inevitable, leading individuals to engage in riskier sexual behaviour. 1/3

Awesome to be featured back-to-back with these other results. Rebecca Thornton was my advisor and the MDICP (now MLSFH) laid the foundation for basically all social science research in Malawi, including mine. I built on their work in innumerable ways.

I just heard from someone that used this paper in a class they teach. Yay!

"How Big Are Effect Sizes in International Education Studies?"

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/...

Knicks up by 22, Hawks call timeout to discuss the fact that the other team seems to be scoring a lot more than they are.

I don’t think “academia is extremely left-wing” and “academia is full of people who find Matt Yglesias unacceptably right-wing” are actually competing hypotheses at all.

From this post by Leah Bevis & @annefitz13.bsky.social: u.osu.edu/aede/2025/03/0…

USAID is an incredible brand and source of soft power. Killing it off would be a disaster for US foreign policy and for millions of the world’s poorest people.

All probationary federal employees at NOAA’s EMC that’s responsible for keeping all US weather model systems running have been fired with 1 hours notice. And that includes me and colleagues. We will not go quietly because we care about the NOAA mission to protect the public.

A LaTeX .sty file for making clean, clear slides - Jason Kerwin If you’re using Beamer to make slides, your slides have way too much extra crap on them. Built-in navigation buttons at the bottom left, multiple layers of header and footer bars, dots that count the ...

Link to kerwin.sty: jasonkerwin.com/Code/kerwin....

Color options: en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/C...

Blog post: jasonkerwin.com/nonparibus/2...

Your slides should avoid having tons of extra junk on them, but the default Beamer themes make that hard. So I made my own .sty file that fixes all the standard issues and put it on my website for everyone to use:

I'm so thrilled to share that I'll be starting as Associate Professor in the Economics department at Macquarie University's Business School in May. Excited for this next step and very much looking forward to getting to know my new colleagues 😊

What should you do instead? Use design-based reasoning, plus the double lasso:

Link to post: jasonkerwin.com/nonparibus/2...

Are you picking controls for your RCT based on which variables have "significant" differences in your balance table? Don't do that.