· The child penalty revisited: Andreas Backhaus at Plausibly Exogenous summarizes a recent paper that argues that the exogeneity of treatment timing assumption underlying the event study design seems suspect – and work using more plausible assumptions about timing exogeneity based on IVF suggests a 7% rather than 20% penalty. Good for thinking about all these event study/mover-design approaches in general. The Economist has more on the gender wage gap, both that same paper and also work by “Camille Landais … and others. It looks at women with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a rare condition in which a girl is born without a uterus but otherwise develops normally. These women know early in life that they will not bear children, and so differ from those who discover this after failing to conceive naturally or through IVF. This could influence their future wages, since women who plan to conceive may make different investments in their human capital. They might, for instance, spend less on education, knowing they might step back from their careers after giving birth….Such early knowledge seems to make a big difference. The study of women with MRKH found they earn much the same as other women and men in early adulthood. Then, in their 30s and 40s, as the wage gap between men and women opens up, the women with MRKH follow a different path. Their wage trajectory is almost identical to that of their male peers. In other words, remove both motherhood and any decisions women might make while anticipating it, and the wage gap seems to vanish.”
· Julia Rohrer has a nice discussion of the age-period-cohort problem, argues that in the absence of time machines that it involves weird counterfactuals, and that we may want to instead just plot and describe stuff without trying to ascribe causal interpretations. I do have an old paper that shows that although you can’t identify the effects themselves, you can identify second derivatives, which can reveal structural breaks, and with one normalization, first derivatives.
· A new VoxDevLit on Industrial Development, with senior editors Francesco Amodio and Markus Poschke. “Historical experience explains why industrialisation once delivered both growth and mass employment, and how policy shaped the conditions under which this occurred….In many countries, manufacturing growth contributes to output and exports but is increasingly decoupled from the creation of good jobs, while services expand earlier than in past development episodes….As the scope for employment-intensive industrialisation narrows, services play an increasingly important role in structural transformation. Recent evidence challenges the view of services as inherently low-productivity or non-tradable.” VoxDev is also hosting a series of 4 lectures on the topic.
· Johan Fourie summarizes lessons from several papers on nation building, and implications for South Africa.” Nations hold together when people who differ from one another still behave as if they share a future. They cooperate, accept rules, pay taxes, and invest in institutions whose benefits largely accrue to others. When that cooperative equilibrium holds, growth becomes easier because trust lowers transaction costs and raises the returns to long-term investment. When it weakens, people retreat into narrower identities or private alternatives, and the economy becomes more conflictual and less dynamic.” – he then summarizes work by Sam Bazzi in Indonesia, and historic work on the Alsace-Lorraine border and on West/East Germany – and argues for the importance of both leaders that can articulate this vision, as well as building shared institutions that can make it real.
· Jishnu Das on what’s next for global health research after foreign aid cuts, and on how donors can increase the production of locally relevant research. “initiatives like decolonization, mandated local authorship, and mandated funding to local researchers rarely invite inquiry into whether these initiatives lead to greater equity or better knowledge. Instead, they rely on a heavy dose of moral persuasion that must, to be effective, remain steadfast in its certitude…Instead of spurring better, more locally relevant research, I am now concerned that these systems will end up cementing an elite cabal that controls all the funds and research…The Tinbergen principle in economics says that you cannot efficiently achieve two policy goals with one policy lever. If funders want to build local researchers, it is best not to enmesh that goal with the second goal of funding research — unless that is shown to be the best way to do so. For instance, if the idea is to build local capacity, the best option may be to fund scholarships for students. Or, to provide unrestricted funds to institutions with a proven track record.”
· SIEF from evidence to policy note on online tutoring in Ukraine during wartime “. The program was implemented through three consecutive experiments between early 2023 and mid-2024, reaching nearly 10,000 students across all regions of Ukraine. The program variants led to substantial learning gains in language and math while also reducing students’ level of stress.”
· Registration is now open for a free online set of interactive master classes on designing and conducting field experiments, run by the Innovation Growth Lab. First session is on Feb 24. “Designed to provide insights into how to design field experiments in science, innovation and productivity. Delivered by leading academics in the field, this course is designed to equip participants with concrete tools, real-world examples, and guidance on navigating the full lifecycle of experimental research.”. Special topics include setting up AI field experiments, experiments in organizations, and experiments in innovation and entrepreneurship – as well as practical sessions on publishing and working with partners (I’ll be talking in the session on April 13 on how to work with firms and policymakers).
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