· Global Skills Partnerships in International Migration: The Center for Global Development has a nice new database of legal migration pathways and webpage with examples of different global skill partnership pilot programs
· “The message to managers is often, “Hey, check in with your employees. See if they’re OK. Care more,” says Ms. Kim Oh, the executive coach. Sometimes caring more means saving a worker from one more Zoom, she adds.” – The Wall Street Journal on how meetings have increased during the pandemic, and how hybrid office life might make it even worse, covering work by Raffaella Sadun.
· Scott Cunningham has put up videos of his mammoth difference-in-differences “CodeChella” online class on Youtube.
· On the Devpolicy blog, Ryan Edwards summarizes a paper on the impact of emigration on central and eastern European firms in the sending countries – “emigration does reduce firm productivity in the short term, but these effects fade in a few years”
· Rob Fuller shares the experiences of the Innovation Growth Lab on the challenges of recruiting SMEs for business-support programs: “Even advertising in specialist publications was found to have little effect: a full-page advertisement on the front cover of a leading nationwide industry publication resulted in only one approach from a suitable business. In the end, most of the successful recruitment campaigns have been based on making direct, one-to-one contact with SMEs. While this can be highly effective, it can obviously also be time consuming and expensive.”
· A Special issue of PNAS contains a set of different experiments testing the effectiveness of community monitoring of common pool resources – including papers on groundwater monitoring in Brazil, local water management in Costa Rica, forest governance in Liberia, waterways monitoring in China, deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon and community monitoring of forest use in Uganda, along with a meta-analysis, a nice intro article, and a couple of comments. This is from EGAP’s metaketa initiative, and it is great to see the collection of papers all come out together as a coordinated issue. The result “The summary estimated effect size on reductions in resource extraction is 0.10 SDs… An effect size of 0.10 SD across a range of interventions has an important implication for sustainability scientists: they need to think more about statistical power. Only one of the studies in the Special Feature was designed to detect an effect of 0.10 SD with power near the conventional level of 80%. Had we only had one or a few of the six studies, we may have failed to detect the effect of monitoring.”
· As you sit on your couch and watch the Olympics over the next two weeks, a review in the Lancet by Bauman et al. examines whether the Olympics leads to any sustained impact on population levels of physical activity – establishing causality is difficult here, with analysis based on interrupted time series in Google Trends data and pre-post comparisons in exercise/physical activity in countries or cities hosting the games. Bottom line seems to be that there is some short-term interest in searches for exercise, but no observed changes in people actually doing more physical activity. So being an Olympics couch-potato is evidence-based…
· Call for papers: the Private Sector Development Network has extended its deadline until August 10 for its annual conference, this year to be held Dec 9-10, and focused on private enterprises in a green recovery.
The Development Impact blog will now be on break until after Labor Day (early September). We have updated our curated links on technical topics, and on survey methods and measurement, as well as our new miscellanea, so if you are missing us, you can revisit old favorites in the meantime.
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