· A positive post by Jishnu Das on what is going right with development economics in terms of process – reflecting on positive changes during his career including greater representation of women, more fieldwork, learning across fields, and rigorous peer review.
· The Hidden Curriculum podcast has an episode with Matt Notowidigdo which discusses how economists should think about negotiations for academic jobs at different stages of their careers. Useful advice for thinking about where universities may have more or less space to move, and what types of things one might consider asking for – and the usefulness of setting a defined period of a few years for these in early career negotiations.
· “In August 2023, over one million Paraguayans disappeared. Results from the 2022 census, released that month, put the number of Paraguayans at 6.1 million — 1.4 million fewer than the numbers projected by the 2012 census. The numbers left Paraguayan policymakers reeling….Paraguay’s experience is not unique. In 2025, Indian enumerators are planning to conduct the country's first population census since 2011. Retrospective surveys done by India's National Population Register suggest that the earlier census could have missed up to 28 million people — roughly the size of the state of Punjab at the time.” – Adam Salisbury in Asterisk magazine on the difficulties in counting people in much of the world.
· On VoxDev, a useful piece by Benjamin Moll and Oliver Hanney on the “missing intercept problem” in going from micro to macro – beware of back-of-the-envelope calculations that scale up micro estimates that come from comparing more and less exposed areas without taking into account possible general equilibrium effects.
· Also on VoxDev, Rothenberg, Wang, and Chari discuss why special economic zones in Indonesia had minimal impact on regional growth. “largely because it targeted remote, low-potential areas and relied solely on tax incentives. Effective design requires careful site selection, complemented by infrastructure investment and policies that reduce barriers to formal sector participation.”
· And finally on VoxDev, Oliver Hanney has a nice round-up of examples of inter-disciplinary research in development economics – with examples from climate science and ecology, psychology, history, political science, anthropology, health, and agricultural science.
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