- On VoxDev: 1) how ethnic patronage determines rents and investments in Kenyan slums; 2) speeding up court pre-trials in Senegal without reducing decision quality. and 3) a video with John Sutton on how to attract FDI and generate jobs in Africa – he is a big fan of industrial parks.
- HBS Afterhours podcast has an interview with Rafaella Sadun discussing her work on the world management surveys, including discussing measurement issues and why basic management is underrated relative to grand strategy.
- 80,000 hours podcast with Eva Vivalt – with a discussion of the Y-Combinator basic income experiment starting up – and whether you should release results in the interim – as well as on how to generalize from evidence, and on collecting priors about projects.
- IPA blog on how to think about accessing some of the social aspects of microfinance groups as people move to digital finance – although the answer offered is just to send SMS messages.
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The papers and proceedings of the American Economic Association annual meetings are now published under a separate title AEA Papers and Proceedings – so no more getting confused about whether the AER on someone’s CV is a P&P or not. Lots of interesting papers as usual (all gated unfortunately). Some things of note related to development (and quite a few more than I don’t note here for space):
- Markus and I (along with 5 other co-authors) have a short paper (ungated) that looks at treatment heterogeneity among women in our personal initiative training experiment. We examine whether existing human capital is a complement or substitute to this type of training, which is important for understanding whether it works for less educated women, and whether it needs to be targeted to specific human capital types. The encouraging news is that it seems training works for those with all levels of schooling, and does not show significant heterogeneity with a range of different human capital measures.
- A couple of papers on using machine learning and cellphone data for development – using cellphone record data to expand digital credit, and using cellphone data to predict wealth
- Why do female enterprise owners earn so much less than men? Hardy and Kiselly show such a gap persists after controlling for firm owner’s cognition, productivity, reasons for self-employment, and product quality – and suggest such a gap must arise from factors outside of the firm and owner characteristics.
- Why is cousin marriage so prevalent in the Muslim world? Edlund offers an explanation based on the fact that men get to choose who to marry, women don’t, but men must pay a price (mahr) that goes to the bride.
- Husband and wife’s attitudes and beliefs about norms on female work, and their association with female labor supply in India.
- A reduction in kerosene use led to a reduction in infant mortality in Indonesia.
- Delayed public sector salary payments and the use of overdrafts in Ghana
- Updated data on the share of women amongst PhD programs and faculty in economics, in the (ungated) CSWEP report: “There has been no increase in the female share of assistant professors in PhD granting departments since 2005; in 2017 it was 28.8 percent” – in 2017 women were 32.3% of first-year PhD students, and 13.9% of full professors.
- Report of the editor for AEJ applied: number of submissions is up 40% since 2015, so published/submitted ratio is now around 5%; half of the papers published in 2017 seem to have come from the AER rejection to AEJ route (Table 1); and decision times are rising – now only 78% are refereed within 3 months; and finally a sign of the rise of the use of restricted access data – 19/42 papers published in 2017 had exemptions to the data sharing policy.
- Funding opportunity: funding call for green climate rapid impact evaluations
- Call for papers: NEUDC 2018 at Cornell with the intriguing additional information that “Harry Potter fans might be excited that NEUDC falls on the same dates as Ithaca’s celebrated Wizarding Weekend; bring the family!”
- Call for papers: the Sustainability and Development conference is to be held in October at Michigan. It seeks “to bring together a diverse and interdisciplinary constituency to engage with the best approaches and means to implement the Sustainable Development Goals and assess progress towards them”, with papers then eligible for a special issue of World Development.
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