We agree with its finding that there is little sign of short-term impacts of deworming on health indicators (e.g., weight and anemia) or test scores, and, as we have previously noted, we believe that this does undermine – but does not eliminate – the plausibility of the effect on earnings.
While we think that replicating and challenging studies is a good thing, it looks in this case like there was an aggressive media push – publication of two papers at once coinciding with an update of the Cochrane review and a Buzzfeed piece, all on the same day – that we think has contributed to people exaggerating the significance of the findings.
While we continue to be worried about the possibility of specification searching in the externality terms, and we see a case for treating the initial paper as a form of preregistration, we don’t see it as at all obvious that we should penalize the Miguel and Kremer results in the way that Aiken et al.
