· Building on our recent post on the Social Science Prediction Platform, Cyrus Samii provides some thoughts about how eliciting priors might be used to help quantify the value of running a proposed experiment ex ante.
· Aaron Sojourner’s Quick Start Guide for Bluesky-Curious Econ Lovers. I also set up a Starter Pack for World Bank researchers you can follow.
· On the Brookings blog, Caren Grown offers an ode of appreciation to the Demographic and Health Surveys
· On VoxDev, Oliver Hanney discusses some of the lessons for cost-benefit analysis that are emerging from recent research. One is the importance of long-term outcome measurement, as some policies may not show immediate gains, but still yield benefits in the long-term. He gives the example of an evaluation of a public employment program for young men during the Great Depression, which had no impact on short-term labor market outcomes, but which a long-term follow-up study found resulted in participants being “taller, healthier, living longer, and earning more over their lifetimes”. This also raises the question of the potential bias in which studies we choose to do long-term follow-up studies of in developing countries, where admin data may not enable long-term follow-ups. Suppose you do a jobs intervention in a developing country, and find zero impacts in the first year. It would be a brave researcher who would decide to do a 5 or 10 year follow-up (especially if no admin data is available), and very hard to persuade funders to fund such work. The post also notes other benefits that narrow cost-benefit analysis may miss: impacts on other household members and on the next generation, general equilibrium effects, and downstream environmental effects, with examples of studies which have looked at each of these.
· Development and Organizations: Highlights from the 2025 Kuznets Mini-Conference: The Yale Economic Growth Center recently hosted its annual Kuznets Mini-Conference, this year focusing on organizations, broadly defined, and covering a range of questions on development and labor. Sessions covered topics such as gender attitudes within organizations, the digitization of tax collection, state capacity, labor markets, credit and poverty traps, and governance. In an event recap, EGC postdoc Binta Zahra Diop provides an overview of the key discussions and links to some of the presented papers. The conference followed Oriana Bandiera’s Kuznets Lecture, "Development and the Organization of Labor”. A video of the lecture will be available on the EGC website.
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