Reading

1. Economics job market site. 2. Data on the flattening of consumer culture (NYT). One-sided, but still of interest. 3. A new and better measure of how much of educational value is signaling. 4. Inside joke concerning the Pope that only some Beatles fans will get. 5. U.S. produc…

India’s Outlook Business has an excellent issue focusing on pollution not just as a people killer but as a growth killer (as I have emphasized pollution reduces wealth and health, see especially this video). I am interviewed; here is one bit: Q. Doesn’t the demographic div…

Many of today’s fastest-growing developing economies, from India to Kenya, have bypassed industrialisation, with workers moving straight from farms into non-tradable consumer services. New structural estimates suggest that productivity growth in these services has genuinely driv…

In Uganda, a disability-inclusive anti-poverty programme helped people with disabilities move from insecure casual work into farming, but it did not reduce prejudice against them, and on one measure prejudice rose.

For a while now, we have been hearing claims that social media radicalize the American electorate, and that social media damage teen mental health. Well, we just held a major set of elections that produced resoundingly moderate results, repudiations of both Trump and the extreme…

Here is the video, audio, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary: The first half of the conversation stays close to the text [Conrad’s Nostromo], covering the novel’s political backdrop, its deliberately scrambled timeline, the near-total absence of religion i…

There has been widespread concern about self-censorship on university campuses, and especially that conservative voices are being stifled. Using survey data from a private elite college, we show that self-censorship is not simply about being conservative: it is students with the…

1. Important people in the AI world. 2. Ted Nordhaus on Bill Nordhaus. 3. “That universities facilitate broader political mobilization can explain why governments often seek to restrict student activism.” 4. NYT obituary for William Nordhaus. 5. A new (job market) pa…

Building an effective state that raises broad-based taxes, enforces the law, and provides health and education is a political problem as much as a technocratic one. Data from 1990 and 2016 points to three persistent clusters of states, but history is not destiny: executive const…

Rohini Pande joined us to discuss the state of international development, based on the introductory chapter of the Handbook of Development Economics, Volume 6, on which she is a co-editor.

Supply chains built on complex inputs and large, well-connected suppliers held up through India's 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns. Firms buying easily replaced inputs were far quicker to cut supplier links.

Procedurally it seems to have gone just fine, and the people predicting “the end of democracy in America” now look foolish. They have been suffering under fundamental misunderstandings of how this country works. During this election cycle, democracy never was under t…

How did trade and economic activity evolve at the End of Antiquity, when political power shifts away from the Mediterranean towards the Middle East and northern Europe? No records of ancient production, consumption, and trade exist. Yet the composition of coin finds reveals info…

Almost half of Ireland’s corporation tax haul comes from just three companies: Apple, Eli Lilly and Microsoft. Here is much more from Jude Webber at the FT, on why Ireland does not always feel or operate like a wealthy country. The post Ireland fact of the day appeared first on…

1. Jason Furman on AI and the CEA. 2. Matt Kahn uses Refine and gets results. 3. Cyril Hilsum, RIP (flat screen TV, NYT). 4. How much of the return to education is in fact a return to genes? 5. Essay contest on how AI will affect developing economies. 6. AI sanity from Nicholas…

My Subaru was showing its years so I recently bought a Tesla. My thinking was I can buy a car or I can buy a car+driver for the same price. Simple choice. I’ve driven about 2000 miles including one long trip (6 hours) to North Carolina and back. FSD is incredible. I don&#8…

In Chile, returning ancestral land to Mapuche communities led them to replace commercial pine and eucalyptus plantations with grasslands for livestock, but it brought no measurable gains in carbon storage or biodiversity.

Tipping is large and growing, but we know little about its consequences for workers and firms. We link point-of-sale and payroll records at 20,000 U.S. firms, which lets us observe tips from customer payment to worker earnings. We find that tips are a nearly constant share of re…

That is the theme of my latest Free Press article. Excerpt, which offers the beginning of the story: If we look at the 1960s, the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson administrations brought James Tobin, Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow (all three later Nobel laureates), Arthur…

Both of these movies I found worth watching. Fjord won the Golden Prize at Cannes, and it concerns the rights of the family vs. the rights of the state, when it comes to raising children. As I interpreted the story, it was so right-wing and so based I am shocked it won. It is by…

1. Why is it now so common to be asked about your food allergies? (GPT Pro answer) 2. Training for alignment, applies principal-agent theory. 3. Do people offload empathy when they think AI can give it instead? 4. The Wallace line. 5. AI can draw blueprints now. 6. Ed Glaeser re…

In India, most manufacturing workers are in small firms partly because most customers can only afford cheap, low-quality goods that small workshops make efficiently, and this explains up to around 40% of the gap in firm size between India’s poorer and richer states.

This week we featured research on sanctions, progressive taxation, pension reform and more!

After US sanctions, Venezuela flared more than twice as much gas for each barrel of oil it produced, as shortages of imported diluent overloaded its oil infrastructure.

In urban China, cuts to pension generosity in 1997 and 2005 led households to save more and work longer, explaining around a quarter of the rise in the household saving rate and half the rise in working hours between 1995 and 2009.

Women in Bangladesh reported more intimate partner violence to female survey enumerators than their male counterparts, changing impact estimates of BRAC’s Ultra-Poor Graduation programme.

With around 250 armed groups operating in eastern Congo, militias often supply the security, justice, and taxation an absent state cannot. Evidence from recruits, civilians, and Kinshasa’s traffic police shows how morality shaped by decades of conflict, alongside organised corru…

In a city-wide experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a progressive property tax raised 56% more revenue than a proportional one with the same average liability. But the tax became progressive in practice only once the government targeted enforcement at the most valuabl…

Drought makes rural households in West Africa more likely to consider moving, and irrigation only helps them stay when droughts are prolonged, mainly for the richest households.

This week we featured research on job search, public procurement, tax collection and more!

Low-income countries collect as little as $30 in tax for every dollar they spend collecting it. High-income countries collect $270. New research suggests that improving the efficiency of how taxes are collected could significantly lift the GDP of low-income countries.

In China, guaranteeing auction winners a fixed share of public hospital purchases cut generic drug prices by around 40% and led winning firms to spend less on marketing, showing that procurement design can curb costly competition for prescriptions where hidden payments are diffi…

In tractor rental markets, owners who cannot observe their operators keep machines close to home, leaving farmers in more productive, remote areas without access to mechanisation. Evidence from around 1,200 GPS-tracked tractors in Kenya shows that digital monitoring expands thei…

Evidence from a survey experiment in Mexico shows that correcting misconceptions about therapy makes university students more likely to share counselling information with peers, while raising therapy use only among students who had recently used it.

Around 70% of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read a simple text, even though cost-effective approaches such as structured pedagogy and teaching at the right level are well evidenced. A four-stage framework – efficacy trials, effectiveness trials, policy plan…

Leveraging Digital Tools for Women’s Skills Development and Economic Empowerment: Evidence from low- and middle-income countries mpodesta@pover… Thu, 03/12/2026 - 12:06 Enabling women’s participation in the labor market is important for their empowerment and financial independen…

Making Finance Work for Women Podcast Highlights IPA Research Publications on Women’s Economic Activity cvu@poverty-ac… Fri, 06/27/2025 - 13:18 In this Section Share --> --> Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum --> View in PDF --> --> Cras ultr…

Understanding the Impacts of Savings Groups on Women’s Economic Activity: Synthesis of Recent Literature cvu@poverty-ac… Wed, 05/28/2025 - 15:13 In this Section Share --> --> Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum --> View in PDF --> --> Cras ult…

Consumer Protection Research Initiative: Gender & Consumer Protection Learning Agenda cvu@poverty-ac… Wed, 04/02/2025 - 13:34 In this Section Share --> --> Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum --> View in PDF --> --> Cras ultricies mi eu turpis…

Preventing Violence Against Women and Girls: What we’ve learned in the 30 years since the Beijing Declaration mpodesta@pover… Wed, 03/26/2025 - 09:16 A group of women walking in the district of Kamwenge, Uganda. © 2018 Aude GuerrucciThe 1995 Beijing Declaration and subsequent Pl…

Why Digital Safety Matters, And What We’re Doing About It cvu@poverty-ac… Thu, 03/06/2025 - 14:18 In this Section Share --> --> Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum Lorem Ipsum --> View in PDF --> --> Cras ultricies mi eu turpis fusce convallis metus id fe…

Supporting Evidence-Based Policy Through Innovation: The Peru MIMP Evidence Lab mread@poverty-… Thu, 02/20/2025 - 13:08 Overview IPA has partnered with Peru's Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (MIMP) to establish an Embedded Evidence Lab within the Ministry's Monitori…

VoxDev Spotlights IPA Evidence on Credit Access for Women Entrepreneurs mread@poverty-… Fri, 11/22/2024 - 16:29 Women often face significant and unique challenges when trying to access capital. These challenges include social and cultural barriers, lack of collateral, and insuff…

Designing Cash Transfer and Graduation Programs to Support Women’s Economic Activity: Synthesis of Recent Literature mread@poverty-… Thu, 08/29/2024 - 10:07 Women are particularly vulnerable to poverty, given inequitable gender dynamics that may limit ownership of productive ass…

Preventing Individual-Level Violence in Conflict Settings mread@poverty-… Thu, 07/11/2024 - 11:30 This policy brief unpacks the current literature on preventing and mitigating gender-based violence, intimate partner violence, and violence against children during and immediately…