Research on charitable giving by IPA President Dean Karlan and Research Affiliate John List is mentioned in Ian Ayres' review of the new Superfreakonomics.
Randomized field trials get a shout out as well, since Ayres writes that all regressions wish they could be based on randomized experiments:
There is a new zeitgeist in the way economists think about running regressions. Today, statistical economists explicitly think of their regressions in terms of randomized experiments. They think of the variable of interest as the "treatment" and ask themselves what kind of assumptions they need to make or what kind of statistical procedures they need to run on the historic data to emulate a randomized study.
Has anyone read Superfreakonomics yet? I'm curious especially to hear a randomista's opinion on the field experiments chosen and how they're presented.
Editors’ Note: Hi, Laura and Jonathan here. A few of the pieces this week come from people who spent years up close with how poor households actually handle money, and keep coming back with something more tangled than the story usually told, and more persistent. Tim will be back for the next edition. - Laura Freschi and Jonathan Morduch