Weekly links July 12: daycare, remittances for education, opaque measurement, funding, and more…

• How should we measure what is a high-income country? Martin Ravallion explains and critiques the World Bank definition on the CGD blog.
• Aid Thoughts discusses new work on the value of daycare in Brazilian slums.
• A new From Evidence to Policy note looks at the long-term impact of a conditional cash transfer on education in Colombia-part of the analysis uses admin data on test scores for graduating students – “students whose families received cash grants were between 4 and 8.4 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school; but Students whose families received the cash grants didn’t score higher on the national standardized achievement test given a year before graduation”.
• Classic papers in behavioral finance summed up in a few sentences – Noah Smith gives his take on essential papers in behavioral finance.
• On the IDB Development Effectiveness blog, Dean Yang and co-authors summarize their new study on the use of matching funds to channel remittances towards education in El Salvador.
• Funding opportunity: The World Bank’s Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) has a new call for proposals for work on basic education, water and sanitation, early childhood development, and health systems. Details here.
• Funding opportunity: 3ie has funding available under an agricultural innovation thematic window. This grant window will fund up to 16 new impact evaluations of interventions in the areas of knowledge transfer, contractual arrangements, adoption, and soil health
• Funding opportunity: (Not just for impact evaluations) IZA and DFID are now accepting applications for funding in Phase III of the Growth and Labor Markets in Low Income Countries (GLM | LIC) program.  This will fund work on 1. Growth and labor market outcomes, 2. Active labor market policies, 3. Labor market institutions, 4. Migration and labor markets, 5. Gender and 6. Data for labor market analysis. Application materials here.

Finally a couple of job openings at the World Bank that may be of interest to some of our readers who are PhD students or recent graduates:

EGYPT: Unlocking the barriers to employment - Looking for a graduate student or Ph.D in Economics with interest in labor markets and experience in panel data econometrics and the use of Stata, to work on a three rounds of panel data on the Egyptian labor market. Key areas of focus for the report include: informality, spatial mobility and inequality, labor market transitions, and policy implications. The duration of the task is August 1-December 30, 2013, with the possibility for extension. Excellent written and oral communication skills in English are highly desirable. For more information, please email Tara Vishwanath (tvishwanath@worldbank.org) and Abla Safir (asafir@worldbank.org) with your CV, a writing sample and your availability.

IRAQ: Poverty and inequality analysis - Looking for a Ph.D student or advanced graduate in Economics with excellent econometric skills and experience using Stata. The analyst will work on a report on poverty and inequality in Iraq with two rounds of cross-sectional household data. The report will focus on correlates and determinants of poverty and vulnerability in Iraq including conflict and incidents of violence, health and education, labor market outcomes, and shocks. Excellent written and oral communication skills in English are highly desirable. The duration of the task is August 1-December 30, with the possibility for extension. For more information, please email Tara Vishwanath (tvishwanath@worldbank.org) and Nandini Krishnan (nkrishnan@worldbank.org) with your CV, a writing sample and your availability.