Thanks for this post, the critique of GiveDirectly seems particularly compelling and important.
On the issue of effects on males vs females, were you able to look into whether they may have converged towards more homogenous effects over time? It seems most of the eradication campaigns studied in the papers listed happened in the 1950s—I would suspect labour market opportunities are significantly stronger for women today, though I haven’t looked at the data or whether this is true for the low-income countries where GiveWell’s malaria charities do their work. Lucas 2010 also finds quite large educational effects on females (with no males included in the study), while Barreca 2010 find no significant differences in economic effects between males and females.
Yeah, I think increasing labor participation rates by women would mitigate this effect seen in the historical data. However, in some places like South Asia it’s remained low (and even declined) since the 90s.
Thanks for this post, the critique of GiveDirectly seems particularly compelling and important.
On the issue of effects on males vs females, were you able to look into whether they may have converged towards more homogenous effects over time? It seems most of the eradication campaigns studied in the papers listed happened in the 1950s—I would suspect labour market opportunities are significantly stronger for women today, though I haven’t looked at the data or whether this is true for the low-income countries where GiveWell’s malaria charities do their work. Lucas 2010 also finds quite large educational effects on females (with no males included in the study), while Barreca 2010 find no significant differences in economic effects between males and females.
Yeah, I think increasing labor participation rates by women would mitigate this effect seen in the historical data. However, in some places like South Asia it’s remained low (and even declined) since the 90s.