· “When a bathroom towel restored an Indian bureaucrat's pride”: BBC News covers a new memoir (Policymaker’s Journal) out by Kaushik Basu, a former chief economist of the World Bank, which “brims with light-hearted and revealing anecdotes about how India's gargantuan bureaucracy operates.” The book also covers his time at the World Bank, but I haven’t got to that part of the book yet and the newspaper exerts don’t have as much about it.
· Scott Cunningham does a nice introduction/explainer of the Athey et al. paper on matrix completion methods for causal panel data.
· Emma Cohn and Douglas MacKay have put up an online bibliography of papers on the ethics of field experiments.
· Freakonomics radio covers the experiment by Heather Schofield, Frank Schilbach, Pedro Bessone, Gautam Rao, and Mattie Toma on the consequences of increasing sleep for the urban poor in Chennai.
· On VoxDev, Clare Leaver, Owen Ozier, Pieter Serneels and Andrew Zeitlin summarize their recent AER paper on selection and incentive effects of teacher performance contracts in Rwanda.
· Planet Money has an episode 100 years since Sadie Alexander which talks about the lack of progress and signs of some progress for black women in the economics profession. Includes interviews with three economists at different stages of their careers, and interesting stories.
· Call for papers: NEUDC will be virtual again this year (hosted by Boston University on November 5 and 6). Deadline for paper submissions is August 15.
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