Shutting down USAID literally made Africa darker.

The latest paper I accepted at the JDE: many surveys let another household member report a worker's earnings when the worker isn't home. @ricardoestradam.bsky.social , Goyheix & @marialombardi.bsky.social measure what that proxy reporting does. 🧵

🚨 NEW: Andy Burnham is set to increase international aid spending to 0.7% of GDP [@Independent]

🚨🚨 NEW ECONOMICS JOURNAL 🚨🚨 We are excited to announce the launch of The Review of Economic Studies: Insights, a new open-access journal in the REStud family. Mission: publish concise, high-quality research on important questions across economics and economic policy.🧵1/13

New paper with @martinscott2010.bsky.social on development aid, politician's decisions and media influence. Aid allocation research tends to focus on how the aid budget gets divided. We look at how politicians make decisions about the size of the aid budget. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

The politician, the press and the public: How politicians’ perceptions of the media shape UK aid allocations

This paper examines politicians’ attitudes and beliefs about the press, their potential role in shaping aid policy and how these views differ from the…

authors.elsevier.com

New survey: Brits think that the UK's new aid budget is too low. One of many interesting findings in the BFPG survey.

Evie Aspinall @evieaspinall.bsky.social · last yr.

10. Only 18% of Britons support spending 0.7% of GNI or more on international development. However, more Britons believe the UK’s aid spend target should be higher than 0.3% of GNI (38%) than believe it should be lower (34%), suggesting some room to increase spending about 0.3%.

I've been down on and critical of development economics in recent years (see marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/14... and marcfbellemare.com/wordpress/14...), but idea.devecon.org, by Dean Yang et al., looks awesome *and so much more inclusive than anything that came before.* Kudos to a great initiative!

International Development Economics Association

IDEA is a global professional association advancing inclusive, rigorous research in development economics.

idea.devecon.org

What is IDEA?

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.

Rats are virtually everywhere humans live. Except for Alberta, Canada. Most residents there have never even seen one. How did they eliminate a pest we take as a fact of life? By waging war.

Noah’s subhead for this piece of his post: “Borjas again”. Failed replications are embarrassing, but they happen. However, they need to be not too common, and they very much need to not always lean the same way. Then they are not inadvertent errors or “mistakes”: they are violations of the... 1/

If you publish in development this is always a super helpful overview of development journals. Wish there were more like this for other journals

David McKenzie@dmckenzie.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Today I have put up my 10th annual look at development journals, which works with journal editors to put together statistics on submission numbers, acceptance rates, review times, and more. This is the post that takes me the most time to do each year blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

🚨 CORRIGENDUM ALERT 🚨 A decade after Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back was published in AEJ: Applied, we've just published an official corrigendum with the AEA. This is a love story. 🧵

I spent a few months trying to get proficient in DAGs. I learned a few things about myself: -Thinking in terms of DAGs is not intuitive to me, even though it is visual -I rarely found that DAGs of complex phenomena helped me understand them. -I see the potential, but am on the outside looking in.

In the Fall I'll be teaching a new MA-level methods course entitled "Applied Statistical Evaluation of Development Projects". It will be 12 weeks, in R, and aimed around RCT evaluations. This is a draft outline. What am I missing? What seems redundant?

New piece in Science: Sudden elimination of USAID grants triggered waves of violence in affected regions in Africa, undermining civic governance and fueling civic unrest. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Aiding peace or conflict? The impact of USAID cuts on violence

Less than a week after its inauguration, the second Trump administration issued a blanket stop-work order for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the largest national human...

science.org

New preprint out today (osf.io/preprints/ps...). We tested whether AI agents are actually infiltrating online surveys. Spoiler alert: they aren't Thread 🧵 [1/9]

🧵1/ Our first meta-science paper (with 350+ coauthors) is published today in Nature. It presents one of the largest-ever reproducibility projects in economics & political science. Here’s what we found 👇

This was fun - thanks to all the participants for great comments :)

Multilingualism, Conflict and Conflict Resolution in Africa@mccrafrica-essex.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Save the date! On Tuesday 24 March at 2pm UK time, Dr Paul Clist from University of East Anglia will present "Bilinguals in the Lab: Why Does Randomising Language Affect Cooperation?" It draws on experimental work in Uganda. Join us! Register here: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/k16YaHVH1U

Can AI detect the ten errors in Moretti 2021? I did a test of GPT5.2 vs GPT5.4 vs refine. Takeaway: current reasoning LLMs are useful, with room for improvement. 1/

Michael Wiebe@michaelwiebe.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🚨Replication alert🚨 I'm pleased to announce that my replication of Moretti (2021) is now accepted as a comment at AER. I find ten issues in the paper. My comment focuses on two major problems; in the appendix, I document eight (relatively) minor problems. 1/

🚨Replication alert🚨 I'm pleased to announce that my replication of Moretti (2021) is now accepted as a comment at AER. I find ten issues in the paper. My comment focuses on two major problems; in the appendix, I document eight (relatively) minor problems. 1/

Super excited about this... I'm hiring a video editor to help bring economics to a mass audience (yes, really). If you're thoughtful, creative, and want to make complex ideas accessible, I'd love to see your work. Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... Or share with your most amazing mates!

It's ironic to see a discipline care **so much** about unbiasedness (causal inference!) at the level of a single test but then have a research production system and culture that is basically a ferocious bias generation machine. This is not good.

‘Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition… We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.’ arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

Who leaked this Number 10 discussion to Jeffrey Epstein? And are there consequences for the leaker? It’s an internal discussion re. getting markets moving in the aftermath of the financial crisis. No doubt of great interest to Epstein and his financial market clients.

🆕 There's a growing body of evidence on the common misperceptions people have about the world. And it turns out that, across a bunch of different settings, correcting those misperceptions seems to be a very cheap way of improving society. Here are some examples: voxdev.org/topic/common...

Common misperceptions: What people get wrong about the world and why it matters

What do people get wrong, i.e. misperceive, about the world? Why do misperceptions matter for economic development? How can fixing misperceptions benefit society?

voxdev.org

New evidence from Africa shows that aid reduces conflict when projects are well managed, but increases violence when management and monitoring are weak. Read today's article to learn more:

VoxDev@voxdev.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🆕 (Well-managed) aid reduces conflict Today on VoxDev, Jacob Moscona (MIT) presents new evidence from Africa showing that aid reduces conflict when projects are well managed, but increases violence when management and monitoring are weak: https://ow.ly/slKc50Y0x2S

The Weiss Fund has a great new initiative for development economists on the PhD job market to support those taking up research positions in LMICs, offering supplementary income + research funds. Please share!

Check out our new VoxDevLit on International Migration! Thanks to co-editors @catiabatista.bsky.social, @econgaurav.bsky.social, @dmckenzie.bsky.social, @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social, & Caroline Theoharides! We look to working together on this "living literature review" in the years to come...

VoxDev@voxdev.bsky.social · 7mo ago

📢 Our new VoxDevLit on International Migration is out now! Senior Editor Dean Yang & Co-Editors Catia Batista, Gaurav Khanna, David McKenzie, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak & Caroline Theoharides review research on international migration. Read & download here: https://ow.ly/qXx950XWAar

These economists are unsurpassed in research on migration & development. Global authorities. Their new resource at @voxdev.bsky.social is a gift that will keep on giving —>

Dean Yang@deanyang.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Check out our new VoxDevLit on International Migration! Thanks to co-editors @catiabatista.bsky.social, @econgaurav.bsky.social, @dmckenzie.bsky.social, @mushfiq-econ.bsky.social, & Caroline Theoharides! We look to working together on this "living literature review" in the years to come...