· Dean Yang is the senior editor for a new VoxDevLit on international migration, on which I am one of the co-editors. “International migration is one of the most powerful tools available for poverty reduction and economic development. This review synthesises rigorous quantitative evidence on the impact of migration on origin countries, as well as the impact of development policies related to international migration.”
· Johan Fourie on the growth of Sports Betting in South Africa, and several new research papers about it globally. “Sports betting thrives where incomes are volatile, formal saving is hard, and big, ‘lumpy’ expenses – school fees, a new roof, a car – are out of reach of most people. In Kampala, economist Sylvan Herskowitz followed more than 1 700 sports bettors. He shows that their targeted payouts match the size of upcoming lumpy expenditures and that when they do win, they disproportionately spend the money on those big items rather than on everyday consumption. When he gave a randomly chosen group simple savings boxes and budgeting tools, their demand for betting fell. Betting, in other words, functions as a second-best savings instrument: an expensive, risky way of generating liquidity when other options are worse. A new American study by economist Scott Baker and co-authors suggests that this is not just an African phenomenon…”. Here is a link to the Kenya study by Laura Barasa that he refers to.
· Big Challenges for Small Firms – an issue brief from the Small Firm Diaries project summarizes some of the interesting patterns they are seeing from tracking small firms at high frequency. “While income and expense variability may be common among businesses of all sizes, small firms must manage these ups and downs in uniquely difficult environments, with few tools at hand. These basic conditions shape the way that firm owners frame and approach decisions across different areas of the business”
· Carlos Chavez on why macro never had a credibility revolution, “macro developed a different toolkit—not because macroeconomists were hostile to clean identification, but because their questions did not permit it” -but then he goes on to discuss some of the different approaches in trying to use exogenous variation in macro, as well as problems with alternatives “The structural models that dominate academic macro have their own problems. Many DSGE parameters are weakly identified—the data cannot distinguish between different configurations of the model. Likelihood surfaces are often flat in important dimensions. Researchers choose calibration targets partly for convenience. The invertibility assumption—that the econometrician observes enough to recover the structural shocks—fails in models with news, signals, or richer information structures than the VAR contains.” – and then how the two are now converging “The path forward is not a choice between paradigms. It is a recognition that different tools answer different parts of the question. Credible identification provides the foundation. Disciplined structure provides the aggregation. Neither alone delivers what policy requires.”
· On VoxDev, Asad, Ahmad and Majid summarize their audit study of how male and female buyers are treated by online sellers in Pakistan. Male and female buyers get quoted the same price and receive products of comparable quality, but female buyers receive a lot more unsolicited contact through phone calls, WhatsApp messages, etc, mostly from male sellers “These non-pecuniary differences matter because, in patriarchal settings, they can impose real and asymmetric costs on women’s participation in markets. In contexts such as Pakistan, women’s economic interactions are closely scrutinised, and unsolicited contact from unfamiliar men – whether messages, calls, or friend requests – can trigger social suspicion or reputational concerns even when interactions are not overtly inappropriate.”
· The QJE is famous for its rapid desk rejections and quick refereeing times. The journal reported that for 2024:Q4-2025:Q3 it received 2,212 new submissions. 69% were desk-rejected, and if sent to referees, median time to first decision is only 34.5 days, and the max only 98 days.
New opportunity for PhD students on the 2026–27 job market
The Weiss Fellowship for Junior Researchers provides supplementary financial support to JMCs building research careers while based in low- and middle-income countries. This covers both assistant professor and post-doc/research-based roles.
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