· Johan Fourie on the thin pipeline of students from Africa studying in top U.S. PhD programs and why this might matter. “In total, there are 137 students from Latin America doing economics PhDs at the top 50 US schools, more than three times the total number from Africa. Keep in mind that Africa has more than double the population size of Latin America”. Kweku Opoku-Agyemang offers detailed thoughts on some reasons for this, including colonial legacies that lead African students to the UK or France instead, Canada also being popular for francophone students and easier visas, China now offering more generous scholarships and lower costs, as well as specifics of the U.S. and its programs (such as the increasing role of prior experience and pre-docs, rigorous math requirements, as well as policy and cultural challenges).
· Many efforts to make it easier for firms to register have yielded modest results. But of course it depends on what the starting point is, and how massive the reform is. On VoxDev, Panle Jia Barwick and co-authors summarize their work on China’s 2014 business registration reform which “streamlined the entry registration process and lowered entry barriers in four major ways: the regulations on registered capital were largely lifted, requirements for pre-registration certificates were significantly relaxed, the cumbersome annual inspection system was replaced with a streamlined annual report system, and stringent requirements for a business address were eliminated.”. They use the staggered roll-out across provinces to estimate a 25% increase in entry, as well as an increase in exit, and that the post-reform entrants were smaller, but slightly more productive, than pre-reform entrants.
· At VoxEU, Pete Klenow has a nice column explaining the creative destruction literature and role of Aghion and Howitt. He gives examples of the types of research and policy implications this work has generated. “A key contribution of the Aghion and Howitt models is that they inspired researchers to connect growth theory to micro data on firms….An important virtue of the ‘creative destruction view’ of growth is that it can explain political opposition to growth-enhancing policies. If growth is genteel in leaving the fortunes of existing firms and workers intact, then there is little or no reason for groups to erect barriers to innovation. In contrast, when growth takes the form of creative destruction, it inherently generates losses in profits and earnings for some existing firms and workers. In turn, this gives incumbent firms and workers an incentive to oppose such innovation.”
· ETRM interviews Jacob Moscona about his work on historical political economy, the value of interacting with non-economists, Brazil’s Embrapa program and its lessons for innovation “Widespread technology adoption is really hard, and I think that not enough credit is given to how much it took in terms of coordinated public investment, in terms of building on institutions and a whole range of things….I think one problem with a lot of recent research that is really focused on these super micro-interventions of “maybe I just nudged someone this way and that can solve this problem of low adoption” is that it inadvertently might lead one to think that these are easy problems to solve or that they’re not complicated and might not require large-scale, coordinated investments or government institutions. It sort of minimizes it in a way that I think might lead one to miss the fact that this is a really hard thing to do.”
· I was sorry to hear that Betty Sadoulet died this week. I first met her when I joined Stanford as an assistant professor and she was one of the very welcoming group of development economists at Berkeley. She advised generations of Berkeley development students, was a former editor of the WBER, and kept incredibly research active even after retirement - the ARE announcement notes that she could have earned tenure again just with her post-retirement publications!
Reminder, our blog your job market paper series is now accepting submissions. Deadline is November 5. Thanks to those who have already submitted
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