- “The average number of new social safety net programs launched each year in African countries since 2010 exceeded 10” – Kathleen Beegle on the Africa Can End Poverty blog discusses the rise of social safety nets in Africa.
- The Declare Design team remind you to stratify your cluster-randomized experiments by cluster size.
- With the job market coming up, a paper on the characteristics of “job market stars” – one factoid is that in development more than half the stars are female, compared to only 20% of all stars...another is that “not a single star student for six years running has taken a permanent job in industry”.
- On VoxDev, Gordon Hanson and Amit Khandelwal discuss using night-light intensity to measure markets- with a comparison to what daytime satellite imagery reveals, and a note that combining the two provides the best results – “daytime imagery is particularly well-suited for defining the extent of market areas, and that nightlight imagery is useful for capturing the intensity of activity within these market boundaries”
- On VoxEU, shaming taxpayers into paying in Slovakia – “the effect is most pronounced among corporations with a very high shaming probability. Within four months, these corporations dramatically reduce average debt from above €80,000 before the adoption of the law to about €5,000 at the end of the period of threat. ... Regression analyses reveal that the average corporation in our data set reduces its tax debt by 8.5% during the period of threat. We obtain qualitatively similar results when we study the self-employed” but “the overall impact of actual shaming on tax revenue is negligible...[as] only few taxpayers are named-and-shamed [and] the effect of actual shaming is short-lived as the public lost interest in the shaming list”
- Seema Jayachandran asks on twitter what people thinking of pre-specifying one-sided hypothesis tests: which led to a large discussion – my read is that economists are mostly against this, statisticians are more in favor.
- Paul Krugman on convergence and why he didn’t become a development economist “When I was in grad school in the 1970s, I thought I should do development economics — because it was clearly the most important subject — but didn’t, because it was too depressing. At that point it was mostly non-development economics, the study of why Third World countries seemed to fall ever further behind the West.”
- On the IZA world of labor, Francis Teal asks are apprenticeships beneficial in sub-Saharan Africa?
- Bonus: Michael Cameron blogs on three papers about the economics of rugby
- Finally, a reminder that our blog your job market paper series is now accepting submissions.
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