Published on Development Impact

Job Market Series 2023 Wrap-Up

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This year was a record for submissions to our blog your job market series, with 65 submissions (compared to 37 last year, and a previous record of around 50). These submissions came from 38 different universities, and were based on work in 31 separate countries plus several cross-country studies. India was the most common setting for research, with 14 posts, then China with 4. The two most common identification methods used were difference-in-differences or event studies (23 posts) and randomized experiments (21 posts), then a mix of IV, structural models, some OLS, and some harder to define or less clear identification strategies.

It was a tough choice to choose which to publish from among these, and we ended up publishing 26. Our choices reflect a combination of how interesting we found the research, how relevant we thought it would be for our readers, how well structured as a blog post we found it, and a desire to have a mix of topics. Some of the main categories of posts we were less likely to choose were a couple of economic history ones in developed countries that did not make enough of a strong link to current development, several studies where the empirical question and identification method were not clear enough, and papers of the sort “something that happened a long time ago still has impacts on an outcome I can measure today”. With the latter category, my personal view is that they are more interesting if they are then used to determine targeting of a program today or to show treatment heterogeneity varies with these historic features in a way that helps us distinguish between different theories.

In case you missed any, and to have these all easy to find in future years, these were the posts published in this year’s job market series:

1.       Sacking the sales staff – How firms in poor countries deal with extreme weather: Guest post by Max Huppertz

2.       Coping with Weather Disasters through International Migration: The Role of Search Frictions and International Migrant Demand: Guest post by Emir Murathanoğlu

3.       Adopting an algorithm improves tax equity when bureaucrats undervalue the wealth of the richest. Guest blog by Justine Knebelmann.

4.       Growing Problems: How Farmers Learn About and Adapt to Climate Change: Guest Post by Dev Patel

5.       Do Higher Prices Screen Out Lower-Benefit Buyers?: Guest post by Mai Mahmoud

6.       Come Together: Employment Decisions and Joint Commuting in Urban Côte d’Ivoire: Guest Post by Florian Grosset

7.       What prevents Indian housewives from local flexible work opportunities? Guest Post by Suhani Jalota

8.       Jobseekers’ point-of-view: How expected discrimination affects job search. Guest blog by Deivis Angeli

9.       Revealing buried grievances: How China's anti-corruption crackdown emboldened workers to strike. Guest blog by Huiyi Chen

10.   Having a good excuse: Incentives’ visibility increases the sharing of stigmatized mental health information among refugees. Guest blog by Emma Smith

11.   Intergroup Dialogue: A Novel Community-Based Approach to Facilitate Integration of Displaced Individuals into Host Communities. Guest blog by Henrique Pita Barros

12.   Firms have a hard time too! Leveraging employment agencies to reduce search frictions for firms. Guest blog by David Qihang Wu

13.   Innovation on the rise, math scores take a dive: Unraveling the potential and perils of teaching innovation in schools. Guest blog by Saloni Gupta

14.   Industrial policy is back! But do countries have the capacity to successfully implement it? Guest post by Philipp Barteska

15.   Can conversations between discriminators lead to less discrimination? Evidence from anti-transgender discrimination in India: Guest post from Duncan Webb

16.   Locusts and livelihoods: dynamic impacts of agricultural shocks on long-run conflict risk. Guest post by Pierre Biscaye.

17.   No train, (because of) no gain? Under-training by employers in spot labor markets: Guest post by Nicholas Swanson

18.   Coping through acceptance: Intimate partner violence and attitudes dynamics. Guest post by Eugenia Frezza

19.   The role of local politicians in establishing capable local governments in violent environments - Guest post by Seung-hun Lee

20.   Using RCTs to Answer Macroeconomic Questions: The Cost of Misallocation among Sri Lankan Microenterprises: Guest Post by Jeremy Majerovitz

21.   Can government restrictions on rural land markets benefit landless workers? Guest post by Julián Arteaga

22.   UBI Financing and Its Long-Term Impacts in Economies with a Large Informal Sector: Guest Post by Kuldeep Singh

23.   The devil is in the design: the benefits and costs of the world’s largest voucher program for primary education: Guest Post by Harshil Sahai

24.   Inequality in Beliefs: Guest Post by Madeline Duhon

25.   Affordable Skylines: Unpacking the Impact of Zoning Relaxation in India. Guest post by Geetika Nagpal.

26.   New seeds, better seeds? Guest Post by Sergio Puerto.

Good luck to all the students on the job market, and thanks to everyone for sharing their interesting work with us.


Authors

David McKenzie

Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

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