· A new podcast “Ideas in Development”, has Kartik Akileswaran (co‑founder of Growth Teams) and Oliver Hanney (of VoxDev) chatting with policymakers about growth in their countries - so far they've covered Vietnam, Peru, and Costa Rica.
· Interview with Abdoulaye Cisse, who has recently joined the Development Research Group and has also been visiting Princeton for part of this year. On how he chooses research questions “I try to focus on questions that feel important to citizens—questions whose answers would be meaningful to my friends and family back home. This orientation helps me stay grounded in what matters rather than what is merely publishable. Once a question feels important in this sense, I map it into the academic literature and think about how to frame it in a way that contributes both to scholarly debates and to real-world understanding.” And his advice “Almost all of my most interesting questions have come from regular conversations with people on the ground such as community members, technicians, and in my case the engineers at the utility company I partnered with. In my JMP, these were the people who truly understood the infrastructure, constraints, and day-to-day objectives, often better than any dataset could. So my advice is to prioritize those conversations early and often. They don’t have to be with policymakers; they just need to be with people who live and work inside the systems you’re trying to study.”
· Alex Imas attempts to reconcile the micro and macro literatures on AI and productivity: “we now have a growing body of micro studies showing real productivity gains from generative AI. However, the productivity impact of AI has yet to clearly show up in the aggregate data. This disconnect should not be surprising at this stage given the history of technology adoption…. Micro studies typically focus on narrow, well-defined tasks. Study participants are prompted to use AI tools and are often given access to training. There are several factors and frictions that would prevent the productivity gains observed in micro studies from showing up in the aggregate data.”
· Johan Fourie 2026 list of the latest and greatest recent research in economic history and how it informs recent policy debates on topics like industrial policy, innovation, migration, gender, and violence.
· On VoxDev, Rana Hendy on why female labor force participation is still so low in Egypt- it “reflects not a lack of education, but structural barriers – segmented labour demand, heavy unpaid care burdens, restrictive social norms, and weak policy enforcement – that prevent women’s educational gains from translating into sustained employment.”; and Susan Godlonton and Caroline Theoharides show how exposure to less restrictive reproductive health policies via international migration lowered fertility in origin communities in the Philippines….”The magnitude of the reduction in fertility is large enough that it cannot be accounted for solely by migrants, but must also include spillovers to non-migrant households.”
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