· The value of (sometimes weird) basic scientific research – in Asterisk magazine Deena Mousa and Lauren Gilbert provide a strong argument for why governments should fund basic scientific research, the economic returns to doing so, and examples of odd-sounding research that had major payoffs.
· On NPR’s Goats and Soda blog, an interview with Dean Karlan about his time at USAID.
· A new free online course on Key concepts in Conflict and Fragile settings will be taught starting March 6, with topics like peacebuilding, institutions and democracy, ethnic diversity and nation-building, geoeconomics, climate change, natural resources and conflict, and more – lots of 60 minute lectures taught by leading experts – designed for those with a masters background in economics.
· There is a new VoxDevLit out on Foreign Direct Investment, and the role of multinationals in lower income countries. The review summarizes the role of multinationals on the macroeconomy, linkages with local firms, impacts on the environment and in the natural resource extraction sector, and on labor markets. Currently the evidence base appears to be much more limited on active policy choices to attract and change the benefits of multinationals. There is also version 2 out of the VoxDevLit on trade.
· On the 100% CI, Julia Rohrer discusses the need to make clear to reviewers/readers why you are doing analysis in the first place, especially when it comes to papers which report associations. “If, instead, you have committed to an associational estimand, the introduction should make it clear why the association is of interest in its own right, regardless of causality. …Don’t write an article with the following structure: introduction that motivates a causal research question; analysis framed in associational terms; discussion that interprets the findings causally; limitation section that says that findings should not be interpreted causally”.
· In VoxEU, Josh Angrist and Marc Diederichs look at graduate students and their advisors from eight top econ PhD programs, using “unique data covering roughly 8,000 graduates from elite economics departments and related programmes since 1989. These graduates and their advisors are highly influential in the profession – together, they account for more than 20% of articles in leading economics journals, and over half of all papers in the top six economics journals.” Interesting stats on publishing “Looking at graduates from economics departments and related programmes, fewer than 60% ever publish in one of a list of around 140 of the most cited journals; only around 45% manage to publish two papers. Publications in top-six journals are even more elusive – only about 30% of graduates ever publish in these outlets, and just 20% achieve two such publications . Careers are also short, with few contributing publications beyond the seventh year post-PhD. These patterns persist in a sample limited to graduates from economics departments.” They find about 10% of advisors end up advising almost half the students – students guided by these more prolific advisors publish more frequently, but this may reflect sorting, with no impact at a school-level of the school having more of these advisors. They end with “A broader lesson suggested by our findings is that research success is hard for elite schools to engineer or even predict.” The paper also looks at gender, which is not discussed in the column “An analysis of gender differences in research output shows male and female graduate students to be equally productive in the first few years post-PhD, but female productivity peaks sooner than male productivity.”
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