· A couple of really nice review papers:
o Pol Antràs on the Uncharted waters of international trade not only provides his expert view of where there are promising research areas in both trade theory and empirics, but also a helpful overview of what the main progress has been in trade research over the past 25 years.
o Kirill Borusyak, Peter Hull and Xavier Jaravel have a very helpful “practical guide to shift-share instruments” that will come out in the JEP. They discuss the two core paths to identification (exogenous shifts vs exogenous shares, how to conduct valid inference and diagnostic tests, and answer common questions about their use. Comes with a nice checklist and summary table of when to use, when not to use, etc.
· In Asterisk magazine, the death and life of prediction markets at Google by Dan Schwarz is an interesting inside look at the challenges and opportunities for using prediction markets to pool the wisdom of crowds inside an organization.
· In the latest CSWEP newsletter, advice from editors Toni Whited and Antoinette Schoar on the publishing process: “authors need to position their papers succinctly and clearly. They have one page plus a couple of lines on the second page to communicate four things. What is the research question? What does the paper do to answer the question? What is the answer? Why should anybody besides the authors care? The answer to this last question is often called a “hook.”…. one of the most common mistakes I see is authors resubmitting to another journal without considering the referee’s comments. The likelihood that the same referee sees your paper is quite high. If the referee tells the editor that no changes were made, this situation does not help the likelihood of publication”
· On VoxDev, Michael Grimm, Sidiki Soubeiga and Michael Weber compare the impacts of cash grants and matching grants for small firms in rural Burkina Faso. “Two years after implementing the interventions, beneficiaries of cash grants showed higher survival rates, improved business practices, more formalisation, and more innovation activities compared to beneficiaries of matching grants and firms in the control group. However, neither cash nor matching grants significantly increased profits, sales, and employment relative to the control group….Due to stricter procurement rules, matching grants were 25% more expensive to implement, yet did not lead to better outcomes. ”
· On the World Bank’s Education for Development blog, a new compendium of a decade’s worth of impact evaluations in Education is launched, with the blog highlighting 5 studies with surprising findings.
· On the Yale Economic Growth Center blog, a wrap-up of this year’s conference on firms, trade and development.
· In the FT, Martin Wolf interviews Lant Pritchett on the case for more temporary labor mobility.
· A J-PAL policy brief on improving job seekers’ skills and earnings through credible skill signals – something Eliana Carranza and I also cover in a recent JEP piece.
· On the CGD blog, Witold Więcek presents an updated meta-analysis of the impacts of mass deworming on child height and weight, and notes that even thought some earlier meta-analyses found null results, confidence intervals overlap and precision has increased over time as more evidence has built – leading to a conclusion that deworming in populations with widespread prevalence is cost effective.
· Funding call: IPA and JPAL will be having calls for funding for work on soft skills, entrepreneurship, and development
· The STARS Fellowship Program is now accepting proposals for the 2025 cohort of fellows. The deadline for submission is January 17, 2025 at 11:59pm Eastern Standard time. The Structural Transformation of Agriculture and Rural Spaces (STARS) fellowship program (formerly the STAARS or STAAARS+ programs), a multi-institution collaboration managed by Cornell University in collaboration with the Center for Global Development (CGD), the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), the World Bank’s Development Research Group, and the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP), announces its annual call for research proposals. Early-career researchers selected as STARS Fellows in 2025 advance rigorous, policy-oriented research on the causal determinants of productivity and income growth, asset accumulation, rural employment and risk management in agriculture and rural spaces.
· Conference call for papers:
o The Midwest International Economic Development Conference (MWIEDC) will be held March 28-29 at UIUC. Submissions due January 8.
o The Theoretical Research in Development Economics (ThReD) conference will be held in Prato, Italy on June 25-26. Submissions due February 1, 2025.
o The German Development Economics Conference (GDE) will be held at Goethe University Frankfurt on June 12-13, with submissions due February 15.
Development Impact will be on break until early January. Happy holidays and thanks to all our readers.
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