🌍 Happening now at #NOVAFRICA2026 Conference in Economic Development @joshdeutschmann.bsky.social from #UniversityofChicago presenting "Contagion in Financial Networks: Evidence from Kenya". #NOVAFRICA2026 #DevelopmentEconomics #NovaSBE

New working paper with Amol Singh Raswan and Chris Udry: "The Sisyphean Pursuit of Evidence for Poverty Traps." A central idea in development economics is that poverty can trap people. We went looking for the cleanest evidence. Here's what we found – and didn't.

Pull incentives can unlock innovation, but poorly sized incentives risk missing the mark. A new Pull Incentive Sizing Tool from @uchi-msa.bsky.social offers a practical framework for getting the scale right: https://go.cgdev.org/4bjRl6L

How Big Should a Pull Incentive Be? A New Pull Incentive Sizing Tool to Foster Innovation

Pull mechanisms, like advance market commitments (AMCs) and prizes, that pay for results are having a moment. After the landmark pneumococcal AMC helped accelerate access to lifesaving vaccines, the m...

go.cgdev.org

Very happy to share that my work with Tanguy Bernard and Ouambi Yameogo on contracting and quality upgrading is now forthcoming at JDE! #EconSky #EconPapers www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Very happy to share that my work with Tanguy Bernard and Ouambi Yameogo on contracting and quality upgrading is now forthcoming at JDE! #EconSky #EconPapers www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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The last in our JMP blog series has Guilio Schinaia with a 2-stage clustered RCT to see how market advisory information affects decisions of cashew farmers in Guinea-Bissau. Information increases farmer revenue, as they make more transactions & get better prices blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?

Should I wait or should I sell? The impact of market information and commercialization advice on farmers’ sales decisions. Guest post by Guilio Schinaia

blogs.worldbank.org

Evaluating a soft-skills course implemented in Ugandan and Kenyan primary schools that replaced academic review time with lessons on goal-setting and related skills as students prepared for primary school-leaving exams, from Dam, Gray-Lobe, Kremer, de Laat, and Morsink www.nber.org/papers/w34562

In today's JMP, Molly Doruska looks at how to protect firms in Dakar from flooding. Individual subsidies had negative spillovers on other firms as water diverted, but combining subsidies with community meeting reduced flood losses without negative spillovers blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?

Do uncoordinated flood loss mitigation investments produce spillovers? Guest post by Molly Doruska

blogs.worldbank.org

In today's job market post, @matteo-ruzzante.bsky.social uses DiD to show how price controls on GM cotton in India spurred adoption by farmers, but reduced subsequent location-specific seed development. Despite innovation reduction, farmers were still better off. blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

Priced for Development? How Price Controls Spread Technology but Stall Innovation: Guest post by Matteo Ruzzante

blogs.worldbank.org

What is happening at Goddard is absolutely devastating. We are losing history. We are losing an incredible amount of human talent, skill, and knowledge. Rebuilding it will be impossible same for same. Industry can not absorb the people or the equipment. This is undoing space science in the US.

Brad Johnson@climatebrad.hillheat.com · 9mo ago

Goddard spacecraft engineer: "I think it just kind of speaks to the atmosphere of the agency and the nation, where people are like, 'Well, laws don't matter for the people at the top anymore.'"

Hiring Alert ⏰ We are looking for postdocs in development econ! This is an exciting opportunity to collaborate closely with Nobel Laureate and DIL Faculty Director Michael Kremer. The position is expected be one year in duration. Apply by 12/1: www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing....

One area where AI has a lot of potential is in weather forecasting and climate modelling. Fairly accurate weather forecasting, in particular, is something that many of us now take for granted. From my latest Substack: www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/artificial...

Artificial intelligence could dramatically improve weather forecasting

An AI-based model outperformed every other in forecasting the Indian monsoon this year. This helped millions of farmers.

sustainabilitybynumbers.com

We are recruiting postdocs at DIL this year. Please apply! www.aeaweb.org/joe/listing.... #EconJobMarket #EconSky

Illinois Gov. Pritzker ahead of Trump National Guard deployment: "To Chicagoans... Look out for your communities and your neighbours. Know your rights. Film things that you see happening... Authoritarians thrive on your silence. Be loud for America."

Just received this statement from Lisa Cook: "President Trump purported to fire me 'for cause' when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so. I will not resign. I will continue to carry out my duties to help the American economy as I have been doing since 2022."

Ben Casselman@bencasselman.bsky.social · 12mo ago

President Trump said he is firing Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, "effective immediately." It's his most direct assault yet on Fed independence -- and a step that it is far from clear he can legally take. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/u... #EconSky

The full 12 minutes of @govpritzker.illinois.gov speech today, which was superb. (Via Nicole Wallace / @msnbc.com segment.) www.msnbc.com/deadline-whi...

'We are watching and taking names': Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker responds to Trump's threats to Chicago

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker holds press conference in response to recent threats made by President Donald Trump to send the national guard to Chicago, in a similar manner that he has done so in Los ...

msnbc.com

There are a lot of USAID post-mortems out there. I read 18 of them and wrote about what they get wrong. In short, the problem is that the development sector’s reckoning with the destruction of USAID has been largely unmoored from what actually happened timhirschelburns.substack.com/p/everyone-i...

Everyone is misunderstanding what happened to USAID

I read 18 pieces reckoning with the end of USAID. Here's what they get wrong.

timhirschelburns.substack.com

What Danielle said. According to the Yale Budget Lab, the average effective tariff rate in this economy right now is 18.2% Let me put that another way. President Trump has raised taxes on American businesses and consumers by -- on average -- 18.2%

Danielle Kurtzleben@titonka.bsky.social · 12mo ago

A thing I really need people to keep in mind: 15% tariffs are high, historically speaking. 10% tariffs are high. The average effective tariff rate before this term was just over 2%. Anything double-digits is high!

On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵

NEW—Earlier this evening agents from ICE/other fed agencies were outside Rhode Island Ave metro in DC asking people exiting the station for their IDs, per someone who experienced it. When the person presented their Real ID license, an agent said that wasn't sufficient. Luckily they had secondary ID.

USAID funded roughly half the world’s supply of ready-to-use therapeutic food. The dismantling of the agency has disrupted the global supply chain that provides the packets, leaving thousands of malnourished children at risk of dying.

A $45 Treatment Can Save a Starving Child. US Aid Cuts Have Frozen the Supply

nytimes.com

New working paper from me & some colleagues on East Africa's maize markets from c. 1900 to today, based on a major data collection effort to fill in the long-run history of food prices in one of the world's poorest regions: www.aehnetwork.org/working-pape...

Kim’s mother: “I immigrated here to the States - I thought I understood it was a country of equal rights where the Constitution applies equally.”

My practical tips for designing, implementing, and analyzing powerful experiments. In today's blog I summarize a new paper I've written for a special issue on power calculations. A key message is that it does not make sense to talk of “the” power of an experiment. blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

My practical tips for designing and analyzing powerful experiments

blogs.worldbank.org

@rglenner.bsky.social advocates for radically simplifying how we do aid (and how we communicate it). www.youtube.com/live/uvyFva0... (starts at 10m30s) #ABCDE2025

The Supreme Court's disdain for Congress, the statutory design of agencies, and the public services they provide to millions truly astounds. Destroying a 50-year-old Cabinet-level department may be the biggest violation of the Take Care Clause in U.S. history—and six justices simply ... don't care.

Mark Joseph Stern@mjsdc.bsky.social · last yr.

BREAKING: The Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to move forward with the abolition of the Department of Education. It gives no explanation for its order. All three liberals dissent. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25... From Sotomayor's dissent:

Can a small pilot project still be effective when scaled up to reach millions? New evidence shows digital advisory can help farmers who experience weather shocks to obtain higher yields. Read today's article to learn more:

VoxDev@voxdev.bsky.social · last yr.

🆕 Customised agricultural advice at scale: How digital extension helps Indian farmers grow more and lose less Today on VoxDev w/ Shawn Cole (@harvard.edu), Jessica Goldberg (University of Maryland), Tomoko Harigaya (Precision Development) & Jessica Zhu: voxdev.org/topic/agricu...

Developing a rapid diagnostic could save thousands of newborn lives and slow AMR. Read the full series to learn more: www.cgdev.org/blog/case-pr... @siddhharia.bsky.social @cgdev.org @rrolapp.bsky.social

The Case for Prioritizing Neonatal Sepsis Diagnostics

This blog post is the first in a series introducing a new working group convened by CGD and the Market Shaping Accelerator (MSA) on developing an advance market commitment (AMC) for a rapid diagnostic...

cgdev.org

This is not about the merits of Iran’s nuclear program. No president has the authority to bomb another country that does not pose an imminent threat to the US without the approval of Congress. This is an unambiguous impeachable offense.