· There is a new VoxDevLit out on refugees and other forcibly displaced populations, edited by Sandra Rozo. This is a rapidly growing literature “Our review identified approximately 250 papers employing quasi-experimental or experimental methods that examine the effects of forced displacement and the policies addressing this issue. The publication of these papers has grown exponentially between 2010 and 2024”. A couple of the key policy recommendations are “. Pair humanitarian aid with long-term solutions: Combine immediate relief efforts with pathways to self-reliance, such as language, vocational training, and labour market access.” And “ Invest in mental health and social cohesion: Develop integrated programmes that tackle (a) trauma and mental health and (b) foster trust and collaboration between host and refugee populations.”
· On VoxDev, Michel Ndayikeza summarizes his work in Burundi on whether doing low-skilled jobs while they wait to find a skilled job is seen as a positive or negative by employers – he finds employers rating anonymized resumes scored resumes with some post-university experience in a low-skilled job higher than those with no experience at all. This was also an interesting fact “government expenditure per student in tertiary education is estimated at USD$2,794 per student, compared to $95 in primary education”.
· Scott Cunningham interviews Nathan Nunn – interesting to learn about his background growing up in rural Canada, and I definitely feel his answer for how his work day has changed between being a grad student and now as a professor “So I think grad school, it was like, 12 hours of work - doing you know whatever it is you're doing if it's like working on one model or writing a paper or tabulating these data or running regressions and so then yeah it's just like a lot of work. I remember not a ton of emails, not a ton of meetings, … and then it just slowly as you know changes over time it's like less and less time for work more emails more meetings with students now more zoom calls and so today What I try and do is whatever work I'm doing, which is research related, do that in the morning and when my mind's fresh. And then I'll usually have meetings with students or other things in the afternoon. But usually I can only carve out two or three hours that aren't these other Zoom calls or meetings and that sort of thing”
· J-PAL interview with the World Bank’s Megan Lang about her motivation for doing work in development, her time as a post-doc, and her advice “For PhD students in the energy and development space, it’s worth thinking about combining administrative data with randomized evaluations. As a PhD student, it’s risky to design a project that relies on getting enough grant funding to collect your own data, and both fundraising and primary data collection can take a really long time. If you can find utilities, off-grid companies, cook stove providers, etc. and find ways to add value to them if they work on evaluations with you, you can answer interesting questions faster and often with larger samples than you could by relying on primary data collection alone.”
· In a new working paper, Dan Björkegren and co-authors provide a use case for AI in a low-income setting with poor internet access: they note in many sub-Saharan African countries the cost of data is a big constraint on internet access, and then compare use of an AI chatbot to internet search for teachers in Sierra Leone – “The chatbot, accessible via a common messaging app, is compared against traditional web search. Teachers use AI more frequently than web search for teaching assistance. Data cost is the most frequently cited reason for low internet usage across Africa. The average web search result consumes 3,107 times more data than an AI response, making AI 87% less expensive than web search. Additionally, only 2% of results for corresponding web searches contain content from Sierra Leone. In blinded evaluations, an independent sample of teachers rate AI responses as more relevant, helpful, and correct than web search results.”
· In a paper in Political Science Research and Methods, Alrababah and co-authors discuss the process they used to reduce attrition in a 4.5 year, 14 round phone survey of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, which retained 63% of the sample by the end. Nothing unexpected here, but useful for those planning a survey – they discuss in particular the usefulness of Whatsapp vs phone numbers for doing surveys, collecting back-up contact information, and a web application they used to semi-automate scheduling of calls and recording of unsuccessful attempts – and note their incentives of $3.5-$7 per round in phone credit.
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