Why should a development NGO invest in the modern tools of impact evaluation? I’ve met with many Christian development NGOs who are eager to understand the real effects of their…
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Blog Post: My Experience with the Alcatraz Swim
A number of years ago on a flight from SFO to the East Coast I was seated next to a guy who told me he was returning home after doing…
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Why the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics is so Important
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics was given to David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens for their work in using observational data and natural experiments to help us understand…
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Why You Should be Glad the FDA has Resumed Johnson & Johnson Vaccines
David Levine and Bruce Wydick Americans—and the world—should cheer the government’s news Friday to lift the pause on the distribution of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. The decision will…
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Why Hope is Essential To Transforming Extreme Poverty
(Written for Christianity Today’s Better Samaritan Blog 1/15/21, click here for link to CT’s online post.) What is the role of hope in escaping poverty? A quick glance at the…
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On Becoming Shrewd Samaritans During the COVID-19 Pandemic
by Bruce Wydick and Kent Annan, appearing in Christianity Today online 10/23/20 Particularly in this time of global pandemic, we want to know how to care for our local and…
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The Impact of COVID on the American Church
This blog appeared as a guest post earlier this month for reopeningthechurch.com, sponsored by the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College and National Association of Evangelicals. Like many churches, the…
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How Much Does this Operation Make Kids Smile?
Recently my coauthors and I finished a CEGA working paper for a research project that fell into the category of one of those “dying to know if this popular thing…
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Snap-Back and Gone-Forever Goods: Understanding the COVID Recession’s Economic Winners and Losers
The smartest administrators will not only plan for delivering education during the pandemic, but will develop capacities to meet the surge in demand for higher education when the pandemic fades.
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How You Can Help a Local Small Business Survive COVID-19
The only way to feel worse about the impacts of COVID-19 than talking to people in public health is to talk to people in business and economics. Macroeconomists often tell…
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10 Ways Academics Can Help Development Practitioners
Development practitioners and development economists have an interesting relationship. We talk about the same things, have many of the same interests, but don’t understand each other well. Practitioners sometimes see…
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What Do We Know About the Impact of Microcredit? Review of an Important New Research Paper
Microcredit has arguably been through more ups and downs than virtually any modern poverty intervention. For decades up through the 1980s, the thought was that the poor would never repay…
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Reflections on a Self-Experiment: 24 Hours of Homelessness in San Francisco
We as development economists are poverty “experts” in many respects. We are experts at talking and writing about poverty. We are experts at developing mathematical models that explain poverty. And…
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Why Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer Won the Nobel Prize Yesterday and What Their Work Means Today
That Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer would eventually win the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences has never been the subject of much debate in the development…
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Self-Assessment Tests for Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving Our Global Neighbor
Part of growing in our engagement with the global and domestic poor is understanding the stage where we are currently along this road, and what our possible roles can be…
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When Should We Give Cash Rather than In-Kind Gifts to Those in Need?
This post is taken from a blog post for the Center for Effective Philanthropy and contains excerpts from my new book Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving our…
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Introduction to Shrewd Samaritan: Faith, Economics, and the Road to Loving Our Global Neighbor
(Excerpt from the introduction to the book–now available July 2019.) It’s been my experience that most people have a genuine desire to help the poor—including the poor in their communities…
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On the Components of Human Flourishing
I returned from Guatemala on this week, helping lead a group of 25 people on a visit to the village where our non-profit organization Mayan Partners works in the western…
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Review of Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why
A great number of life’s important questions are causal questions. Whether we are a parent trying to choose the best school for our child, a physician pondering the best approach…
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3 Reasons the Impact of Microcredit May be Bigger Than We Thought
Beginning about four years ago, microcredit as an effective poverty intervention seemed dead, or at least on life support. Along with a couple of earlier studies, the six famous randomized…
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Assessing the Status of Microcredit
Recently I had the opportunity to take part in a webinar that discussed the status of microcredit, specifically whether or not researchers believe it works. To complement a piece on…
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How Trump’s Misunderstanding of Foreign Trade May Help His Bargaining Position
In the next weeks and months, the United States and China will enter into a serious dialogue on trade. At stake is the Chinese economy, the protection of U.S.…
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On Giving Tuesday: The Gift of Entrepreneurship
It’s Giving Tuesday, a day that has become prominent enough in our culture to make us either give, feel guilty about not giving, or come up with a powerful, self-justifying…
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Six Roles in Global Poverty Work
When giving talks to college students at different universities, I find that most students are looking to align their lives with a cause greater than themselves. Among these, many could…
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Why I Cannot (Fully) Embrace Effective Altruism
One of the most popular schools of thought in global ethics today is a movement called Effective Altruism. Founded on the work of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, it draws heavily…
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