· How can we empower girls to end poverty – Berk, Sarah Baird and Craig McIntosh summarize their work on cash transfers in Malawi in the Science Journal for Teens – with a teachers’ key and other resources. A great way of showing high schoolers some of the interesting work economists do.
· VoxDev has a piece by Jing Cai and Shing-Yi Wang who “investigate the impact of eliciting workers’ feedback on their managers on worker, manager, and firm outcomes using a field experiment in China. The experiment involved 76 production teams with 1,250 workers in a large automobile manufacturing firm” – treatment leads to a reduction in worker turnover and improvement in productivity.
· Also on VoxDev, David Neumark and Luis Felipe Munguía Corella examine 61 papers on the effects of minimum wages in developing countries, and find “employment is more likely to be reduced when the minimum wage is binding, in the formal sector, when enforcement is strong, and for vulnerable workers”
· On the CGD Blog, Pam Jakiela and Owen Ozier highlight the role that older sisters play in helping raise their younger siblings in many developing countries – and note the need for both more measurement of this in surveys, as well as for impact evaluations of early childhood interventions to look at spillover impacts on older children.
· YouTube video of the Immigration Policy Lab’s webinar on using automated Whatsapp surveys. One example is them implementing this to ask a 22-question survey by Whatsapp to Venezuelans in Colombia (at a cost of $2.97 per survey).
· Reminder to Blog Your Job Market Paper: submissions are now open for our “blog your job market paper” series, with a deadline of November 5 (next Thursday!). Please remember that if your paper is about identifying a causal impact, we want you to be very clear what the identifying assumptions are, and what the estimation method you are using is.
Join the Conversation