· Jishnu Das has part 2 on his “what’s right with development economics” series about recent evidence on how we can improve the lives of the poor by solving market failures and distributing cash….”to understand the flaws in a discipline, you have to understand the strengths. And the examples I have illustrated hopefully go to show that development economists ARE working on some of the biggest and hardest problems in the world today and ARE making significant progress. AND this progress is being made using RCTs in highly imaginative ways.”
· ETRM interviews Nicolás de Roux about his work on firms, how he tries to stay updated on research while working in a university in Colombia, where he gets ideas from, and influencing policy.
· The latest CSWEP newsletter has advice on different ways to get visibility in the economics profession, discussing self-promotion, using institutional pathways, public engagement through books, and academic social media.
· A new VoxDevLit is now out on deforestation, with senior editors Francisco Costa and Allan Hsiao. Oliver Hanney also has a round-up of 10 myths in development where research has shown widely held beliefs to be false (e.g. high-skilled emigration is bad for developing countries; cash makes people lazy; cutting out middlemen would be great for farmers).
· Also on VoxDev, Pauline Castaing and Jules Gazeaud summarize takeaways from their meta-analysis of index insurance experiments in agriculture.” We estimate sizable but somewhat imprecise effects: farmers offered insurance cultivate 8% more land, use 9% more pesticides, 9% more fertilisers, and 16% more seeds…We conclude our analysis by using our model to predict the effect of index insurance in a new setting. We find that the posterior intervals of the predicted effects all comfortably include zero, which reflects the large uncertainty arising from variation in treatment effects. For example, we estimate that the treatment effect on fertiliser in a new context has a 50% chance of falling between 0 SD and 0.13 SD, 25% chance of being negative, and 25% chance of being larger than 0.13 SD”
· Kyle Butts on two strategies for doing causal inference with spatial treatments
· Conference calls for papers:
o Call for papers for a conference on recent advances in the design, implementation, and analysis of household surveys in low and middle income countries, to be held December 8-9 at the World Bank. A special focus will be on highlighting research for improved measurement of work and employment and applications of AI and machine learning for improving survey measurement.
o Call for papers for the 2nd World Bank conference on institutions and prosperity, which is focused on institutions for supporting firms and workers. The conference is Jan 28-29 at the World Bank, with submissions due October 31.
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