- The AEA continuing education website now has webcasts up from Dean Karlan and John List’s mini-course on field experiments
- The Economist Free Exchange blog covers a couple of papers on how reliable results in economics are, including Marcel Fafchamps new paper suggesting splitting the sample in two
- Catching up on the Economist, a piece on how hard it is to predict growth, and especially downturns: “Over the period, there were 220 instances in which an economy grew in one year before shrinking in the next. In its April forecasts the IMF never once foresaw the contraction looming in the next year. Even in October of the year in question, the IMF predicted that a recession had begun only half the time. To be fair, an average-growth prediction also misses 100% of recessions.”
- On the LSE impact of social sciences blog: 5 strategies to get your writing unstuck by Raul Pacheco-Vega.
- A new working paper by List, Shaikh and Xu on multiple hypothesis testing in experimental economics – they recommend a bootstrap procedure and provide Stata code
- The difficulties and high cost of using infrastructure spending to stimulate the economy and create jobs: “If a project can pass a reasonable cost-benefit test, then go for it; if not, then don’t. A bridge is not an economic stimulant—it’s a bridge.”
- The World Bank has launched a new gender data portal
- Calls for papers: Innovation Growth Lab conference on trials on innovation, entrepreneurship and growth in London; for the UNU Wider conference on human capital and growth in Helsinki; the Young Lives conference at Oxford; and for next year’s AEA conference in Chicago (due April 1).
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Greetings. Did you publish a paper on this topic already? I would like to understand better your methodology, in order to compare with mine. I performed a similar analysis on a sample of 58 countries, for the study period (2010-2020). Preliminarily, I´ve found three distinct groups: 1. Some countries show large underreporting in the initial years of my study period, followed by... decreasing amounts in recent years. 2. Other countries showed persistent but varying underreporting of debt data in all years of the study period. 3. Other countries show small amounts of underreporting and overreporting of external debt stock, which seemed to be related to deficiencies in their debt compilation, recording and reporting systems. Few countries have debt "surprises" above 5 percent of their initial reporting. I compared the 2022 external debt stock (published in the WB website), for the period 2010-2020, to the external debt stock published in the WB printed report, two years before. Look forward to see your paper. Best regards, Jose Oyola, Ph.D. Consultant, World Bank joseoyola@att.net +1 571-344-3440
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