· Jishnu Das has set up a substack called the Cranky Corner. He has a long post summarizing some of the debate around privatization in education, which includes a summary of a recent paper on value-added, where they find“ There is “substantial variation in school quality, much of which is within villages.” The most striking example of this is that, accumulated over 5 years, the difference in test scores between children in their current school and the best school in the village is the same as the test-score gap between high and low-income countries! There is also “considerable variation within both the public and private sectors.” We show that (a) school quality is more varied in the public compared to the private sector and (b) that excess variation arises because there are some very low-quality schools in the public sector—at the top end, public and private schools are very similar.”
· In the Harvard Data Science Review, Maria Jones has a piece summarizing the experiences so far with reproducibility packages for World Bank working papers and other products – including processes for verifying analysis with proprietary data. “in the first year of the initiative, only 17% of the packages submitted reproduced exactly as submitted. Seventy-seven percent required substantive modifications to be reproducible. Six percent required expected minor and quickly resolvable changes such as adjustments to file paths or minor coding mistakes. The most common issues that arise are that the outputs produced by the package did not match the manuscript (version control) or that undocumented manual steps were required to produce the final tables from the direct outputs (e.g., doing additional calculations in Excel before creating figures, copy-pasting values from the Stata console to Excel). Another common issue is that the package includes only intermediate data files, that is, data files constructed through undocumented processes. Other packages are unstable, meaning that the results change every time the package is run, or contain coding mistakes such that the review team cannot run the package from start to finish.”
· In Nature Communications, Santiago Izquierdo-Tort, Seema Jayachandran & Santiago Saavedra present evidence from a RCT in Mexico that looked at whether modifications to payments for ecosystem services (PES) contracts can reduce deforestation more cost-effectively. “we conduct the first randomized trial to test the impacts of requiring PES participants to enroll all of their eligible forest landholdings (full enrollment). The primary outcome is avoided deforestation, measured using satellite imagery…We compare the full-enrollment treatment group to a control group that was offered a PES contract that gives participants the flexibility to enroll some lands for conservation while leaving other lands outside the program (standard PES or partial enrollment). Since payments are conditional on maintaining only the enrolled parcels, under standard PES, participants can be in compliance yet continue their business-as-usual deforestation by clearing non-enrolled lands….In the standard contract arm, 14% of the forest area was deforested over the year. The treatment group deforests 5.7 percentage points (pp) less (p-value = 0.01), equivalent to 41% less deforestation.”. A nice example of a small sample pilot experiment (N= landholders 64) on a tough to randomize policy question.
· The World Bank’s Skills Global Solutions Group has a nice monthly digest they do that highlights a different skills topic and provides a summary of some recent policy and academic research. Their website has past editions including AI for skills development, and Digital skills training, while their October newsletter (not yet up on the website) is all about “green skills” – this is a buzzword you hear more and more, so it was nice to have links to different pieces explaining what this could mean – from the generic “Green skills refer to the knowledge, abilities, values and attitudes required to support and promote the sustainable development of society and economy in a livable planet” to more specifics “While these are often associated with technical fields like energy and construction, green skills actually cover a broad range – from generic technical skills that reduce greenhouse emission and resource usage, to specialized expertise in renewable energy systems, to socio-emotional and managerial abilities needed for sustainable project management. … For example, agriculture specialists need green skills to implement water conservation and agroforestry techniques, while managers in any sector require them to effectively plan and execute sustainable projects.” There are then links to different papers with advice on measuring and quantifying green skills and green jobs.
· On VoxDev, Oliver Hanney gives his thoughts on how to summarize academic papers for a policy audience, based on editing 350 or so VoxDev articles. One pointer is that papers often start with a really broad problem, and then end with a very narrow solution – but that summaries should aim for a more mid-level “there is a “useful zone” for paper summaries where feasibility (what a policymaker can control) and external validity (what a policymaker can take from your results to their own context) overlap.” He also talks about the fine-line between overselling and underselling your findings, where he finds at the margin economists are too unwilling to state clearly what they think “If an article’s only conclusion is that a policy may, could, can, potentially, or might have an impact, it is not obvious what the next steps are from a policy perspective.” – and also less on the robustness checks and more on the details of the implementation and what the policy did. And for lit reviews and synthesis pieces “Often, when academics ‘synthesise’, they sit on the fence. Understandably, there is a reluctance to make broad sweeping statements if the evidence isn’t there, but academics are allowed to know things, and there are a growing number of topics where the weight of evidence does point in a specific direction.”
· Nice interviews with Francis Annan and Jeremy Magruder in the Berkeley ARE breakthroughs magazine.
· Last reminder: submissions to our blog your job market paper series close next Wednesday.
· Pre-doc and Post-doc positions in the IFC Economics Research Department: the IFC has a relatively new research group called IFC Economics and Market Research (CER). The topical focus of the research group includes, but is not limited to, local capital and banking market development, digital economy/finance, entrepreneurship, energy access and green transition, food security, trade and value chains, firm productivity, growth and job creation, gender and inclusion. They are currently looking for pre-docs to join them in D.C., and a post-doc for their Paris office:
o Pre-doc (up to 3 positions) Deadline: 11/7/2024. Selection Criteria: Bachelor's degree in economics, finance, computer science, statistics, math, or a closely related field. Two years of relevant experience is preferred. Candidates planning to apply for a PhD program within the next 2 years are strongly encouraged to apply for this position. External candidate link. Internal candidate link
o Post-doc (1 position) Deadline: 11/15/2024 Selection Criteria: The candidate must possess, at the time of starting, a doctoral degree in Economics, with evidence of strong potential (1-2 years of relevant experience) in one of the following applied topics: development economics, environmental economics, industrial organization, trade and investment, and financial economics. External link. Internal link.
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