post-semester blahishness

Well, I've conquered another semester. I suppose you could say I have smitten it (not that smiting two classes is the hardest thing in the world). I'm still working on grading (which doesn't count, because it's my job, not school), and even though my econometrics paper is done and turned in, I'm still very much thinking about it because it's just one of the many continuing steps in the process of writing my thesis. But given that I generally like my thesis project, I'm not annoyed by the lack of closure.

Speaking of my thesis, I got a bit of indirect good news. First of all, I'm not sure if I've explained this before, but we're using a somewhat novel technique to create our dataset. We administered surveys only once to a variety of individuals, which normally yields a cross-sectional data set: many observations (borrowers) compared to each other at a single point in time. This is in contrast to time-series data, which is a single observation (say, a country) examined over multiple periods of time. If you collect information about multiple individuals (or countries or whatever) at multiple time periods, then you have panel data--it is both cross-sectional and longitudinal. What we have created is what's called a back-cast panel: we asked borrowers about things that happened in the past and when they happened, and used this information to construct panel data (i.e. in 2004 this household acquired a TV). We will also be creating "lag" variables, which allow us to look at a particular window of time before and after a borrower first got access to microcredit to see how likely they were to have, say, purchased a business asset during that time period. I won't go into the monotony of explaining how the lag variables work, but I will say that you end up with neat line graphs that show, hopefully, something like a big spike in the number of people acquiring productive assets 2 years after they first got credit, or something like that. Not only do you see if credit is effective, but you see if its effects are immediate or if they take a while to kick in.

Back to the sort of good news. This technique was suggested to us (okay, it was basically forced on us, but I don't have any better ideas so I'm not complaining) by my advisor. He and a colleague at UCSD just wrote a paper using the same technique on data collected by a guy that graduated from the IDEC program last year. The paper tied for first place in an impact assessment contest sponsored by USAID, which has been promoting research related to microfinance in the last several years. The people who gave the award described the paper as being "notable for its innovative use of recall data of highly memorable events to create a methodologically rigorous impact assessment approach that holds significant potential for widespread applicability." The reason that this is good news for me is that it will lend the glow of legitimacy and rigor to my own paper. The technique is new enough to still be interesting and novel, but it has also gained some acceptance in the field of microfinance impact analysis.

I was supposed to go to a party tonight, but I've been rather moody and antisocial all weekend. Last night I was mired in one of those feeling-sorry-for-myself places, but at the moment I'm feeling content to be at home and feel a bit on the gloomy side; after all, I could be doing something more "fun" if I wanted to, but I'm not, so evidently I don't really want to have fun right now. I also don't feel very much like drinking, which I would probably end up doing at the party.

Maybe I'll take a bath. I bought some French chamomile soap at this little co-op in SoMa (I guess it's in SoMa...that area confuses me endlessly) called Rainbow Grocery. The soap smells really good, and it has little slivers of what I assume is chamomile in it, so it's mildly exfoliating. I walked to Rainbow from downtown on Wednesday, I think, which was fun because I got to explore the SoMa/Mission area a bit (in the rain, but that's okay). I saw an X-rated cake bakery, a revolutionary socialist bookstore, and what I assume was a bar of some sort. The bar didn't have a sign, but instead it had a life-sized leopard-spotted cow statue hanging above the entrance. Anyway, Rainbow Grocery was like an independent hippie version of Whole Foods (or I guess I should say that Whole Foods is a slick, yuppie version of places like Rainbow). Just before going there, I happened to read an article in The Economist critiquing the environmental benefits of organic foods, which made looking at all the organic shampoos and stuff even more interesting. But I did buy some organic soup and organic pita bread anyway.