Insuring Against Hunger? Long-Term Political Consequences of Exposures to the Dutch Famine

Malnutrition is one of the greatest global challenges affecting more than 900 million individuals in developing and developed countries across the world. While previous studies have established that malnutrition has serious and lasting negative consequences on individuals' health, education, and labor market outcomes, very little is known about its effects on individuals' political views later in life.

Placebo Tests for Casual Inference

Estimates of treatment effects using observational data can be biased due to confounding, model misspecification, and other reasons. A placebo test offers a complementary diagnostic for evaluating these threats to inference by checking for a relationship that should be found in the data if the main estimates were biased, but should be absent otherwise. Drawing on a comprehensive survey of recent empirical work in political science, this paper defines placebo tests, introduces a typology of tests, and analyzes what makes them informative (both in ideal and non-ideal circumstances).

Sri Lanka: Dr Vinya Ariyaratne

Sri Lanka: Dr Vinya Ariyaratne, President of Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s largest grassroots development organisation active in 15,000 villages; Lead Facilitator of the One Text Initiative in the Sri Lankan conflict; Adjunct Faculty at Brandeis University, USA. A medical doctor and public health expert, he has been personally engaged on the frontlines in providing emergency relief country-wide during and after the civil war, in natural disasters and now during COVID 19. He has advised and collaborated intensively with the WHO, World Bank and several UN and humanitarian bodies.
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