A special Wednesday links, since today (at 8pm!) is the deadline for submissions to our blog your job market paper series, and we will be starting publishing this series tomorrow.
· Version 4 of the VoxDevLit on business training is now live, along with a podcast interview with me on what’s new. One of the goals of the VoxDevLit series is for them to be living literature reviews, updating frequently as new evidence emerges. The latest edition includes about 20 new studies, and allows us to talk more about the longer-term impacts of training and consulting interventions, business training for youth, training firms to enter export markets, and the early evidence on using AI to help train business owners. We have updated the meta-analysis to include the new studies, and it is nice to see that we have now reached a stage where the estimates of standard training seem pretty stable – it will take a lot of new evidence showing different impacts to shift what we have learned. We also draw out a few big gaps in the literature, such as how to best select entrepreneurs for different types of programs, and the extent to which training/consulting can be a standalone versus should be implemented along with financing and other ecosystem services.
· A new VoxDevLit is out on political polarization, edited by Cesi Cruz and Horacio Larreguy. Also on VoxDev, Emily Beam and co-authors summarize their work on how group coaching in graduation programs did just as well as individual coaching, at a much lower cost – based on trials in Bangaldesh, Uganda and the Philippines. “Group coaching versions of the programme were 15–20% cheaper to deliver than the individual coaching versions… Overall, we confirm that group coaching versions of the programme are more cost-effective on our key welfare outcomes – consumption, food security, and well-being – across all three study sites.”
· Also on VoxDev, Ma, Muendler and Nakab use data from Brazil to examine how working for firms that export affects workers. Workers not only earn more in exporting firms, but also: “workers employed at exporting firms experience steeper wage growth over their careers compared to those at non-exporting firms – particularly when the exporters serve high-income markets… these gains are largely portable when workers move to other firms.”
· on the CGD blog, Eeshani Kandpal and Charles Kenny explain why it is important for the World Bank to have an independent research department. “There are three reasons the World Bank needs an independent research department: rigor and accountability, blue sky thinking, and generating public goods.”.
· Lauren Gilbert summarizes what we know about rates of return migration, determinants of who returns, and how return migrants can benefit home countries with skills acquired abroad.
· Teaching an undergraduate course on causality by Guido Imbens and co-authors – and materials for their course are here.
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