This week we featured research on tax evasion, experiments and institutions, school feeding programmes, social media & more...
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Today we released a post by Ana Lucia Kassouf, Verónica Amarante and Jane Kabubo-Mariara about the underrepresentation of Southern researchers in academic journals and conferences. This post, released in collaboration with the IEA's Women in Leadership in Economics Initiative, discusses what needs to be done to address the barriers faced by Southern researchers.
We also released an article by Sofia Collante Zárate, Catherine Rodríguez and Fabio Sánchez which explores the medium and long-term educational outcomes of a nationwide school feeding programme in Colombia. The benefits are wide-ranging and long-lasting.
Earlier this week, Ramón Enríquez, Horacio Larreguy, John Marshall and Alberto Simpser show that digital information campaigns on social media can be used to disseminate objective information about government performance and bolster electoral accountability. They outline evidence on a nationwide digital information campaign in Mexico here.
Tax evasion is common in low- and middle-income countries, and estimating the share of formal firms that evade tax remains a significant challenge for policymakers. Christopher Hoy, Filip Jolevski and Anthony Obeyesekere outline the findings of their new research that implements a ‘double-list experiment’ on formal firms in Indonesia to reveal the true extent of tax evasion.
In this week's episode of VoxDevTalks, Michael Callen and Jonathan Weigel spoke to Tim Phillips about the importance of institutions in economic research, the rise of experimental tools to measure institutional change and the concept of critical junctures.
How—and to what extent—do supervisors impact worker performance? Yesterday, Ritwika Sen discussed the findings from her field study in Uganda examining how supervisors can affect worker productivity. She finds that supervisors can be a cost-effective way to boost worker productivity.
How do firms deal with rising uncertainty in both upstream and downstream markets as a result of the increasing number of shocks hitting global supply chains? On Tuesday, Anindya S. Chakrabarti, Kanika Mahajan and Shekhar Tomar outlined how firms redirected trade in India following state border closures during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier this week we hosted our webinar on Generative AI, led by Anton Korinek, which showed how students and researchers based in low- and middle-income countries can begin to use generative AI for economic research. A recording of the webinar and the slides are available on our website. Be sure to also check out Ungated Research, which makes cutting-edge research papers more accessible.
It has also been a busy week elsewhere in development economics. There is lots to read:
- BRAC released a write up of our recent interview with Asif Saleh on climate adaptation.
- Jennifer Doleac's annual women on the economics job market thread.
- Our World in Data added a page of statistics on Foreign Aid.
- Jishnu Das started his new series, "Conversations with the Public Pessimist", with a post on the privatisation debate in education.
- A write up at Chicago Booth on research exploring How Developing Countries Can Rebuild Trust in Procurement Bidding
- A WWHGE Insight Note on "A/B testing in education"
Lots to watch and listen to:
- PEP are hosting a webinar on North- South Collaboration on November 5th.
- A recording of a recent CGDEV event - What Can Donors Learn from the Rise and Fall of DFID?
- You can tune into day 2 of the IGC-Yale EGC conference later today. Earlier this week they released a blog on what is new in the research on Firms, Trade, and Development.
And some exciting opportunities:
- For those based at a UK research organisation eligible for ESRC funding, you can apply for funding to develop and administer a global evidence synthesis infrastructure to transform the evidence ecosystem.
- DIV (USAID) is hiring Evidence and Innovation Specialists
We will be back on Monday with a full week of content on environmental threats, alcohol and mortality, gender stereotypes in classrooms and more!