Robert S. McNamara Fellowships Program. | © World Bank
The Robert S. McNamara Fellowships Program offers aspiring development economics researchers from developing countries the opportunity to engage in rigorous, policy-focused research in the World Bank’s Development Economics Vice Presidency (DEC). Hosted in Washington, DC, from September to June each year, fellows work under the guidance of seasoned researchers in the World Bank’s Development Impact Group (DIME) and Development Research Group (DECRG).
This blog post highlights the experiences of four McNamara Fellows from the 2023 cohort. These fellows gained hands-on research experience by joining projects tackling forced displacement, obstacles to effective public service, efficient tax policy, and crime reduction—among many other challenges. They also participated in trainings, workshops, seminars, and mentorship at the World Bank, where they learned best practices and technical skills for reproducible research, built their professional networks, and reflected on the impact of their own future work, in academia and beyond.
Magdalena Cortina
As a young, Chilean, female economist, I joined the World Bank as a Robert S. McNamara Fellow seeking greater exposure to development economics. My move to Washington, DC, was motivated by a desire to deepen my understanding of poverty and inequality, as well as to learn how to conduct research that could inform the design and evaluation of effective public policy.
During the fellowship, I worked with Senior Economist Sandra Rozo on the Longitudinal Survey of Forced Migrant Children (VenRePs-Kids), which examines the impacts of forced migration on Venezuelan children who migrated to Colombia between 2015 and 2020. A lack of data poses a major obstacle for researchers and policy makers in addressing the needs of refugee children. In my role, I cleaned and analyzed data from the second wave of the survey, conducted weekly frequency checks, and generated reports for the survey firm to address any concerns or mistakes. In addition to data analysis, I collaborated with Sandra Rozo and Juan Miguel Jimenez on a literature review on children and migration, recently published as a World Bank Policy Research Working Paper. This fall, I will be starting my PhD in economics at Texas A&M University, with my experience as a McNamara Fellow serving as a cornerstone of my career as an economist and researcher.
Temidayo Falade
Prior to the Robert S. McNamara Fellowships Program, I had completed a couple of internships, and I was certain I had developed all the essential skills in development. Well, I was wrong! My fellowship cut across key units in the Development Impact Group (DIME)—the Bureaucracy Lab and DIME Analytics—which provided unique complimentary skills.
With the Bureaucracy Lab, I supported one impact evaluation generating insights into the challenges that civil servants face in navigating their roles and delivering on their tasks. Across five countries (Ethiopia, Estonia, Lithuania, South Sudan, and Croatia) poor leadership was identified as a major challenge in the civil service. While many past studies have highlighted this challenge, I had some difficulty adopting their findings because many of these research outputs failed to yield consistent results, partly due to the challenge of reproducibility.
I came to understand what reproducible research is during my time with DIME Analytics. I was trained to use GitHub and other statistical tools to verify reproducible research, and I supported verifying over 20 research packages. DIME’s approach to reproducibility verification is the first of its kind at the World Bank and has received a lot of recognition so far. To be part of this effort made my time during the fellowship not only relevant but also productive and inspiring.
Kudakwashe Maposa
As I transition from a background as a tax administrator, with limited research experience, my time as a Robert S. McNamara Fellow has been a truly transformative experience. One exciting project I engaged with used stores’ scanner data to examine the distributional price effects of a temporary value-added tax (VAT) cut in Argentina. Under the guidance of a research economist, I conducted a detailed analysis to understand the extent of the tax cut’s pass-through to prices according to various store characteristics. While engaged in this project, I significantly improved my proficiency in Stata and familiarized myself with new techniques for presenting patterns, trends, and results visually. It was thrilling to see how empirical analysis can lead to a precise understanding of the evolution of a policy’s impact at the micro level.
This prompted me to think more deeply about how I can translate this same analysis to policy reforms in my home country. The skills and knowledge I acquired have already made a tangible impact on the tax authority in my home country, and serious discussions about collaborations on tax research with the World Bank are underway. I assure aspiring young researchers that the fellowship is indeed a unique chance to grow, learn, and contribute to development and impactful policy reform!
Devvrat Raghav
While scrolling mindlessly through Econ Twitter, I came across the Robert S. McNamara Fellowships Program, almost by accident. As I would discover in the months to come, it was a happy accident. The premise—fellows are matched to researchers in either the Development Research Group (DECRG) or the Development Impact Group (DIME) and work with them on active projects—was very engaging. Indeed, for somebody who intends to pursue a PhD in economics, such an experience is valuable because it teaches you not just what research is but also whether you like it.
In addition to hands-on experience, the fellowship offers many other learning opportunities. The World Bank has a rich culture of weekly seminars, regular conferences, policy discussions, and brown bag lunches. The sheer variety in both event type and topic area ensures that there is always something new to learn. These events are supplemented by workshops and courses—such as Reproducible Research Fundamentals, which taught me how to write comprehensible code that is easily reproducible—and the opportunity to connect with active DEC researchers, which allowed us to draw upon their experiences in diverse areas. The fellowship blends exposure to academic research with the policy-centric focus of the World Bank, which makes for a nigh unique mixture that has something to offer to anybody with an interest in economics or public policy, whether in academia or elsewhere.
Original fellow blog submissions have been edited for publication. Applications for the next cohort of fellows will open in February 2025, and application details will be available at the Robert S. McNamara Fellowships website.
The full versions of their reflections are available here.
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