Published on Development Impact

Weekly links May 19: another list experiment, P&P highlights, government nudges, and more…

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  • The papers and proceedings issue of the AER has several papers of interest to development economists, including:
    • Esther Duflo’s lecture of “The Economist as Plumber” – “details that we as economists might consider relatively uninteresting are in fact extraordinarily important in determining the final impact of a policy or a regulation, while some of the theoretical issues we worry about most may not be that relevant”…” an economist who cares about the details of policy implementation will need to pay attention to many details and complications, some of which may appear to be far below their pay grade (e.g., the font size on posters) or far beyond their competence level (e.g., the intricacy of government budgeting in a federal system).”
    • Sandip Sukhtankar has a paper on replications in development economics, part of two sessions on replication in economics.
    • Shimeles et al. on tax auditing and tax compliance experiments in Ethiopia: “Businesses subject to threats increased their profit tax payable by 38 percent, while those that received a persuasion letter increased by 32 percent, compared to the control group.”
    • 4 papers on maternal and child health in developing countries (Uganda, Kenya, India, Zambia).
  • Following up on Berk’s post on list experiments, 538 provides another example, using list experiments to identify how many Americans are atheists.
  • The Economist on how governments are using nudges – with both developed and developing country examples.
  • The equivalent to an EGOT for economists? Dave and Markus have come up with the EJAQ or REJAQ for economists who have published in all the top-4 or top-5 journals.
  • Call for papers: TCD/LSE/CEPR conference on Development economics to be held at Trinity College, Dublin on September 18-19. Imran Rasul and I are keynote speakers.

Authors

David McKenzie

Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

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