- In news that delighted me and my cohort this week, apparently people in their 40s are the key to a nation’s productivity, embodying “a good balance of experience and creativity”, and “The higher the ratio of people aged 40-49, the faster the economy tended to increase its output per hour of work”. You’re welcome.
- Duncan Green on what aid agencies need to do to get serious about changing social norms
- Macartan Humphrey’s Oxford CSAE keynote talk video on the challenges of generating knowledge – some concepts I liked included the risks of research as entertainment, fishing across studies for the result motivated users like, and discussion of how mechanism experiments may not always deliver the promise they seem to offer.
- A shout-out to the nice summaries of some of the CSAE sessions being done by Oxford’s DPhil students on the CSAE blog. These were nice substantive summaries of a few papers, with some reflection and genuine information-sharing. I particularly liked this one on labor which discussed some of the innovations in measurement (such as using fitbits to measure productivity), this summary of Macartan’s talk, and this summary of work on formality.
- A nice follow-up to my ALMP post this week (where one of the areas for new action is getting people to migrate to where jobs are) – comes this post from the IGC of preliminary results in Bangladesh of how migration assistance and on the job training had a big impact on getting workers into the garment sector.
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