· David Deming in the Atlantic laments the concentration of major economics prizes in a few top universities and argues for rewarding more research with practical value, having prizes for public impact, and for the federal government to increase funding for economics research and how it is allocated. “ Empirical research is expensive. Ambitious new assistant professors now require hundreds of thousands of dollars in start-up funding to hire research assistants, run experiments, and produce and analyze data. But whereas science and engineering faculty are expected to eventually become self-sufficient by obtaining research money from other sources, especially the federal government, very little public money is available to economists. The discipline’s biggest federal funding source is the National Science Foundation, yet less than 1 percent of all NSF money goes to economists. Without public funding to balance the scales as it does in science and engineering fields, empirical economics research becomes clustered among the handful of universities rich enough to pay for it.” – on the latter I would say be careful what we wish for, since so many scientists lament that they move from being post-docs doing science to grant-writers managing others doing it – having to spend a lot of time fundraising to fund your salary as well as research costs is not high on my list of ways to improve economics.
· Probablygood has a nice interview with Ranil Dissanayake, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, who has worked in several different policy jobs in development, and provides a good example of how to use a PhD in economics outside of academia – and of the importance of making sure you talk with people at all levels of your organization.
· On VoxDev, Anup Malani and co-authors summarize their work in India on pricing health insurance – they offer households different prices to buy health insurance, tracing out a demand curve and seeing how much adverse selection there is as prices rise: 79% of households take it up when free, but 60% are prepared to pay a price equal to the government premium. “We find evidence of adverse selection: households who pay to enrol have higher average costs than those who enrol when insurance is free. Enrolled households who were charged the government’s cost to insure them had nearly three times greater utilisation rates vs enrolled households offered free insurance.” – although it is unclear to me whether higher usage is just adverse selection, or also that people value the insurance more and use it more when they have paid for it.
· Melissa Graboyes on her experiences attempting to return with the results of her research (on the history of malaria elimination attempts) and share them with participants in Zanzibar and some of the difficulties faced and lessons learned (h/t Dave Evans). They found it costly in terms of PI time to prepare the materials for doing this, and challenging to get the original participants to show up for a community meeting even when food and a token payment to cover transport were included, and she notes the importance of a local collaborator for being able to do this. “My personal take away from the experience was that it was a challenging activity, even having thought about the process, read about it, and being committed to it.”
· Dietrich Volllrath has an interesting overview in Asterisk magazine on thinking about the types of cities in developing countries including work on producer versus consumer cities and the cost of living, as well as on whether activity is over-concentrated in a single city: “consumer cities are similar to resort towns or vacation spots: they are where money gets spent, but not where things get made…. All else equal, countries with consumer cities have higher poverty rates and a larger share of population living in slums, as well as lower shares with access to improved water services or sanitation.”…”Gilles Duranton… describes reasons that developing country cities have been less economically dynamic than their historical peers. One is that the urban system of developing countries — their entire collection of cities — tends to be more concentrated in a single primary city when compared to rich countries…. A potential issue with significant urban primacy in places like Argentina or Angola is that it limits the circulation of workers and knowledge across locations. It can create so much congestion that any positive productivity effects of having a large population are overwhelmed. Urban primacy is more likely to develop around consumer cities as resource rents and taxes tend to flow to a central seat of government, and hence these cities get “too big” to maximize economic growth across the whole urban system.”
· A new J-PAL policy brief summarizes evidence from 10 RCTs and 3 non-experimental evaluations of interventions to help build farmers’ resilience to climate change – such as flood- or drought-tolerant seeds, weather insurance, rainwater harvesting pits, guaranteed credits, better weather forecasts, and help in pursuing non-farm sources of income generation.
· Conference call for papers: The KDI School of Public Policy and Management, in collaboration with the World Bank’s Development Impact (DIME) group, is hosting the 5th Development Impact Conference in Seoul, Korea, on November 14-15, 2024. All development-related topics will be considered, and there will be lightning seminar sessions for graduate students. A call for papers announcement can be found here. The submission deadline is September 22.
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