- The Call for Papers is up for the World Bank’s Annual Bank Conference on Africa. The theme is “The Challenges and Opportunities of Transforming African Agriculture.” The conference is June 2017 at UC Berkeley. Papers are due February 24. (Some support is available for African presenters whose work is accepted.)
- Thomas Schelling, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2005, passed away this week. You can read about his life and work from Henry Farrell at the Washington Post, William Grimes at the New York Times, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, or elsewhere.
- We are in the home stretch of our Job Market Series: We will have 17 posts in total, with the three final posts to come next week. You can easily find all the posts in one place here.
- A new Finance & PSD Impact note highlights the results of an experiment which tries to formalize firms in Benin by enhancing the benefits of formalization.
- Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has a good summary and very nice things to say about Das et al.’s new AER paper comparing private and public health care in India, using “standardized patients” (or mystery clients, as they are sometimes called).
- Education Next collects its 20 most popular articles of 2016, including prominent education economists like Eric Hanushek, Thomas Kane, Dan Goldhaber, Ludger Woessmann, and others.
- Ahmed et al. report the good news and the bad news on child marriage in Bangladesh at the IFPRI Research blog.
- Nabaneeta Biswas writes about the heterogeneous impacts of women’s electoral success on girl survival in India at the Economics That Really Matters blog.
- As we enter the holiday season (you know, the solstice), here’s a bit of advice for you.
- Bruce Wydick offers a behavioral economics argument for gift cards over cash as gifts. (I completely agree with him.)
- If you’re insistent on physical objects, a host of news outlets have put together their best economics books of 2016 lists: Diane Coyle for FiveBooks, Robert Samuelson for the Washington Post, Martin Wolf for the Financial Times, Büchshelf, and The Vore.
- Plus, here are the best books from Foreign Affairs, and Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution’s best fiction and nonfiction. (My favorite books of the year so far – both novels – are Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing & Igoni Barrett’s Blackass.)
- I couldn’t find good lists of the best international development books for 2016. If you’ve seen them (or if you make one), add them in the links!
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