· The Econ that Matters blog interviews Meredith Startz – and discusses, among other things, the lessons from interviewing market traders “As a graduate student, a lot of the reading I had done and data sets I had worked with involved rural household surveys. I learned useful things about survey methodology from that context. But there were also things that did not translate at all to doing urban commercial surveys. You have to figure out how to adjust to the context you are in. For example, I was used to seeing these 150-page long survey instruments that loop through every input to every crop grown in two different seasons by every member on every plot. And then I got to Lagos, and eight minutes into the survey, respondents were looking at their watch and saying, “I have customers now, please leave my shop.” Figuring out the difference between sitting down with a farmer for two hours and sitting with a shopkeeper where they maybe give you 30 minutes and how you needed to adjust your surveys was a big learning process for me.”
· In the Journal of African Economies, Stefan Dercon discusses how to give policy advice that takes the politics into account. “I pay more attention to the demand side, and note that it cannot be taken for granted that policy makers welcome economic advice from researchers, or at least not always or on all issues. The key is that policy makers may not necessarily be interested in economic growth or poverty reduction, but have other objectives. It means that to understand how to give economic advice for better economic or development outcomes, economists better understand the economy’s politics and the economic decisions that serve the political outcomes. “. He gives an interesting example: “The case of fuel subsidy reform in Iran in 2010, where fuel subsidies were removed despite strong political opposition, is illuminating (see Guillaume et al., 2011). Working with the Central Bank, the government put compensating cash transfers into 80 percent of the population’s bank accounts, but in a way that they were locked and could not yet be used. It was then announced that these would be unlocked only when parliament agreed to the fuel subsidy reform, creating credibility that support would come in other (and economically less distortionary) ways. It undermined those opposing it: support in parliament was now overwhelming, protests on the street were minimal and the reform was successful. This was definitely not a first best policy: the fiscal cost of these compensatory payments to households and similar payments made to firms was equivalent of about 75 percent of the first year’s fiscal savings from the abolition, and the scale of compensation to 80 percent of the population was definitely not to the poorest only. However, it allowed the transition to go relatively smoothly.”
· On the LSE blog, Swati Dhingra, an associate professor at LSE and an external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, talks about why she got into economics, her advice for young women economists about how to say no and protect your time, and the importance of working on what interests you rather than what you think will publish best.
· On the OECD’s Cogito blog, Tim Bartik continues his call for place-based policies, arguing that they not only help create jobs in distressed communities, but can be good for overall national competitiveness. “The US – along with many other countries – has tried to revive distressed communities in many ways over the years. One cost-effective job creation strategy is “customised business services”, which target specific industries or firms with services tailored to their specific needs. “Customised business services” include tailored infrastructure development, industry-specific job training, and targeted business advisory programmes. Business-specific infrastructure includes industrial parks, research parks, and business incubators, all of which supply specific types of businesses with real estate adapted to that type of business’s needs.” – this list has a lot of overlap with our work in developing countries.
· I just came across this useful post on ouR data generation, by Keith Goldfeld, on how to think about the sample size needed for an experiment from a Bayesian perspective: “When I conduct a power analysis within a frequentist framework, I usually assume set of fixed/known effect sizes, and the hypothesis tests are centered around the frequentist p-value at a specified level of α. The Bayesian power analysis differs with respect to these two key elements: a distribution of effect sizes replaces the single fixed effect size to accommodate uncertainty, and the posterior distribution probability threshold (or another criteria such as the variance of the posterior distribution or the length of the 95% credible interval) replaces the frequentist hypothesis test.”
· Call for papers: for the Fragile Lives 2025 conference on 30 September and 1 October 2025 in Berlin, incorporating the 21st annual meeting of the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN). “We invite papers and panels that analyse causes, dynamics and consequences of insecurity and violent conflict around the world. We welcome any paper focusing on lives, livelihoods, farming, migration, forced displacement, poverty, inequality, political behaviour, attitudes, peacebuilding, food security, nutrition, demography, mental health, climate change, shocks, coping strategies, or the impacts of policies and programs in fragile contexts from a micro-perspective” – submissions close April 6.
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