Weekly links February 15: time to change your research production function? Hurray for big retailers and big data, but watch out for dynamic responses, and more....

• This is the best thing I’ve read all week, particularly because it contrasts so much what my usual workflow looks like with what I would like more of it to look like – Cal Newport (of Deep Work fame) asks in the Chronicle Review “is email is making professors stupid?”. He notes that in the modern environment professors/researchers act more like middle managers than monks and suggests reforms to significantly restructure work culture to provide professors more uninterrupted time for thinking and teaching, and require less time on email and administrative duties. He gives the example of Donald Knuth, who does not have email and has an executive assistant who “intercepts all incoming communication, makes sense of it, brings to Knuth only what he needs to see, and does so only at ideal times for him to see it. His assistant also directly handles the administrative chores — things like scheduling meetings and filing expenses — that might otherwise add up to a major time sink for Knuth. It’s hard to overstate the benefits of this setup. Knuth is free to think hard about the most important and specialized aspects of his work, for hours at a time, disconnected from the background pull of inboxes”. It does make me think back to this old post I wrote on O-ring and Knowledge Hierarchy production functions for impact evaluations though, and the continued ability of O-ring issues to stymie my projects.

Now that I’ve noted that, here’s plenty of things to distract you from working deeper:

• On VoxDev, David Atkin, Ben Faber and Marco Gonzalez-Navarro provide a nice summary on how the expansion of multinational retailers in Mexico led to large welfare gains through improving product prices and varieties to consumers, with these effects much larger than welfare losses to small businesses competitors, and employment effects being small.
• On Let’s Talk Development, Penny Goldberg provides her recent presentation on how Big Data is delivering wins for development.
• Oxford CSAE’s Coders Corner on calculating in Stata the road distances between locations
• Also at CSAE, I always enjoy Ranil Dissanayake’s weekly links, which he usually sandwiches between an opening lamentation on cricket (all I can say is that I would like New Zealand vs India to be judged on wins per capita) and closing pop-culture pick-me-up – this week’s example has plenty of good links including the economics of institutions, inspiring women in economics, and the importance of contract enforcement.
• Finally, Phys.org has a summary on the Dynamic consequences of dynamic pricing experiments on Alibaba – based on pricing promotions offered on a sample of 1 million customers  (research paper) – in the short-term customers buy more, but they then become more strategic in future shopping, searching more for lower prices, and this behavior spills over onto their shopping at other retailers who did not offer promotions.