Weekly links March 28: surveying shopkeepers, giving second-best policy advice, Bayesian power analysis, saying no, and more… David McKenzie March 28, 2025 This page in: English

https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations/weekly-links-march-28--surveying-shopkeepers--giving-second-best The Econ that Matters blog interviews Meredith Startz – and discusses, among other things, the lessons from interviewing market traders “As a graduate student, a lot of the reading I had done and data sets I had worked with involved rural household surveys. I learned useful things about survey methodology from that context. But there were also things that did not translate at all to doing urban commercial surveys. You have to figure out how to adjust to the context you are in. For example, I was used to seeing these 150-page long survey instruments that loop through every input to every crop grown in two different seasons by every member on every plot. And then I got to Lagos, and eight minutes into the survey, respondents were looking at their watch and saying, “I have customers now, please leave my shop.” Figuring out the difference between sitting down with a farmer for two hours and sitting with a shopkeeper where they maybe give you 30 minutes and how you needed to adjust your surveys was a big learning process for me.”