David McKenzie's blog

·         A remarkable sounding experiment – randomizing the freedom to short-sell stocks – is covered on Bloomberg. They worked with a money manager and randomized which stocks they changed the supply of lendable shares in, working with over $580 million in securities. Bottom line seems to be that positive and negative shocks on short-selling supply had no impacts on prices or volatility.

The new book Uncontrolled by Jim Manzi has attracted a lot of recent press (e.g. see Markus’ recent post for discussion of David Brooks’ take, or this piece in the Atlantic), and makes the argument that there should be a lot more randomized experiments of social programs. I was therefore very interested to order a copy and just finished reading it.

The book is one-third philosophy and history of establishing cause-and-effect in science, one-third discussion of how experiments have been used in business and social sciences to date, and one-third politics. I found it half-interesting, but also a missed opportunity to really learn from what has been done in business.

·         Data from all 13 rounds of our Sri Lanka microenterprise survey, along with questionnaires and do files are now all up on Chris Woodruff’s website at Warwick.

I spent Friday and Saturday at the BREAD development conference at Yale (program here). It differs from most conferences - which feature many papers each presented for a short amount of time- by instead having only 7 papers each presented for 1 hour 15 minutes with plenty of spirited discussion. The conference featured some interesting papers, including one on third-party auditing for pollution in India and one on how labor immobility hampered development in the American South that I will likely discuss in future posts. But I thought I’d instead focus today on a couple of more general issues that came up in the course of the discussions.

·         Tim Ogden writes on the mysteries emerging from new work on ways to increase savings - on the FAI blog.

·         Discussion on Andrew Gelman’s blog about whether one can learn anything general from analysis on convenience samples.

“More and better jobs” is a goal for many policymakers around the world (along with part of the title for a recent World Bank South Asia flagship report on employment). How to create “good jobs” is a key question that the next World Development Report is also expected to help answer. Few people are likely to argue against more good jobs, but one of the trickier policy questions is how much of a trade-off there may be between the number of jobs and how good each job is?

In a new working paper with Caroline Theoharides and Dean Yang, I find strong evidence for a jobs quantity-quality trade-off when it comes to migrant jobs. We start by noting that two key facts about international migration are:

The American Economics Association announced today that the 2012 Johns Bates Clark medal (for the most significant work by an economist under age 40) winner is Amy Finkelstein of MIT, who has made important contributions to the study of health and insurance markets. The AEA summary of her work is here. See our coverage of some of her most recent work on the Oregon Health Experiment in a post last July on Development Impact.

·         A very useful round-up of the microinsurance literature including several impact evaluations on the FAI blog.

·         My colleague Leora Klapper and manager Asli Demirguc-Kunt have just released new global data on financial access around the World called the Global Findex, funded by the Gates Foundation. See another post here. They added questions to the Gallup World poll, so have the most comprehensive data yet, which is accessible through this website – I encourage you to explore.