Weekly links September 25: finding a job outside academia, big data to measure mobility and air pollution after Covid, upcoming conference presentations, and more…

·       Reminder: happening today – the second day of the migration and development conference is being live-streamed from 9am-1:30pm.

·       The IDB has a great real-time Coronavirus impact dashboard which allows you to see how traffic congestion, mobility, air quality, and public transport use are changing at the weekly or even daily frequency in different Latin American cities since the start of the pandemic. One key feature that jumps out in some of the data is how much week to week variability/seasonality there is in some measures, so just comparing data now to early March will not give a good counterfactual of what “regular non-Covid” outcomes would be in many cases.

·       With the job-market coming up, Rebecca Wolfe of MercyCorps discusses where to look for non-academic jobs in development, and what to consider when deciding between academia and non-academic jobs. The AEA’s latest CSWEP newsletter also has advice for job seekers and early career researchers (and the statistic that “the DC Metro area is home to nearly 8,000 economists!). The graduate student international political economy workshop is organizing two panels next week on careers in development outside Academia – one on development and research on Tuesday; and one on policy and industry on Thursday.  This might also be a good time to remind you of the series of interviews we did on the many awesome ways of using a PhD in development economics outside of a research university:

o   Alan de Brauw and Bailey Klinger on IFPRI and the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab.

o   Alix Zwane on Gates Foundation, Evidence Action and the Global Innovation Fund

o   Jessica Hoel and Tahir Andrabi; and Kartini Shastry and John Maluccio on Liberal Arts Colleges

o   Evan Morkum on Mathematica

• I enjoyed catching a couple of sessions of the Advances with Field Experiments conference this week. They also have an asynchronous sessions with a bunch of 5-minute videos that authors have made summarizing a range of different experiments – with quite a few of interest to development audiences.

• Virtual BREAD conference next week. Here is the program. It will be live-streamed on Youtube at the following links:
  • Thursday 1 October: https://youtu.be/TU-_xDR3x7I

  • Friday 2 October: https://youtu.be/s5e59mY81L0

  • Saturday 3 October: https://youtu.be/Hantn-qH1AM