We're hiring! The Department of Economics, University of Oxford is recruiting for two permanent Lecturer/Senior Lecturer positions: economics.web.ox.ac.uk/lecturer/sen... and economics.web.ox.ac.uk/lecturer/sen.... Applications close 25 May.

Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Economics

Deadline: Monday, 25 May, 2026

economics.web.ox.ac.uk

Every time I fill up the department coffee machine I am so so tempted to use decaf… they gotta learn its a RANDOMIZE OR BE RANDOMIZED world out there…

The Atkinson Conference on Economic and Social Inequality will take place on 10-11 September at Nuffield College (Oxford). ▶️Plenaries: Philippe Aghion, Janet Gornick & roundable moderated by FT's Sarah O'Connor. 🚩CfP Deadline: 22 May. Join us in Oxford! Details here: atkinsonconference.github.io

Life was boring and busy. He would try to write poetry to make more out of it. It appeared to be a good thing. Some people know the names of dead poets, it must be a good thing.

Team "Elsevier Highlights Subversion" strikes again! Best one yet! @deankarlan.bsky.social, Monica Lambon-Quayefio, Utsav Manjeer, @christopher-udry.bsky.social

Johannes Haushofer@johanneshaushofer.com · last yr.

Remember the "Highlights" that some Elsevier journals require? Dean Karlan and friends developed an amazing way to troll them: haikus!

Thrilled to see this at @ecmaeditors.bsky.social w/ @clementimbert.bsky.social! Can developing cities create enough good jobs to accommodate climate migrants? Spoiler: Yes! Over a decade, drought-induced immigration ⬇️ informality and ⬆️ the of formal firms and jobs in Brazil.🧵👇

Minneapolis is a place that means a lot to me, so I wrote a short Substack about the city, its people, and what we all owe them. benansell.substack.com/p/my-minneap...

My Minneapolis

An ode to a city that knows who it is

benansell.substack.com

Fulvia Budillon, Andre Gray, and I are hiring a field RA for a project in Mozambique, starting in the spring. Please see application information here: www.saralowes.com/resources.html. Deadline February 13. Please apply!!

Resources

If you would like a letter of recommendation, please review the posted instructions and use the template: [ Instructions ] [ Template ] [ Release Form ].

saralowes.com

Please help spread the word on this, especially to those who may be feeling cold winds towards their research. We’ve opened the call for our International Fellowships, enabling early career researchers to work for two years at a UK research institution www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

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!

Excellent full time research assistant position in India with @jainr.bsky.social from @econ.uzh.ch. This is a field-based, travel-intensive role rather than desk-based research. Application details: lnkd.in/e_YzfZEt

The anecdote about "true and non-trivial" ideas from social sciences leaves the impression that ideas other than comparative advantage are either trivial or untrue. Behold more basic ideas (from economics) that are true and non-trivial. #EconSky mytwocentsandcounting.substack.com/p/true-and-n...

True and Non-trivial Ideas from Economics

There is a well-known anecdote suggesting that, aside from comparative advantage in trade, virtually all ideas in the social sciences are either false or trivial.

mytwocentsandcounting.substack.com

I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants - and how I built a dashboard to see through it

I wanted a dinner recommendation and got a research agenda instead. Using 13000+ restaurants, I rebuild its ratings with machine learning and map how algorithmic visibility actually distributes power.

open.substack.com

1. In Hamburg there is a "fully autonomous train" that for some reason has a human operator to press the ON switch first thing in the morning and the OFF switch at the end of the night. In a recent talk about AI in science, I asked the audience to consider whether they want to be like that operator.

All aboard except the driver? A fully autonomous train takes to the tracks in Germany

YouTube video by euronews

youtube.com

Why impact evaluations are so important: not everything that sounds like a good policy actually has the desired impact. While many interventions are highly effective, others don't work at all:

NBER@nber.org · 11mo ago

Examining the One Laptop Per Child program in Peruvian rural primary schools finds no significant effects on academic performance but some evidence of negative ones on grade progression, from Cueto, Beuermann, Cristia, Malamud, and Pardo www.nber.org/papers/w34495

"Humans aren’t very efficient movers—until you put us on a bicycle, when we become some of the most energy-efficient land travelers in the animal kingdom." www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hu...

What does a Nobel Prize on ‘innovation-driven economic growth’ actually reward? A historian’s perspective on how to deal with the Nobel frenzy beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2025/10/13/w...

Or, "no one wanted to look at this thing because it's a hot, hot mess, and finally I did, and guess what? It's a hot, hot mess."

Per Engzell@pengzell.bsky.social · last yr.

"Significant contribution to the field" often translates to "first person to care about this very specific thing"

Reading rec: "Challenges in Statistics: A Dozen Challenges in Causality and Causal Inference" arxiv.org/abs/2508.17099 Great overview of both the state of the art and open question in causal inference!

Challenges in Statistics: A Dozen Challenges in Causality and Causal Inference

Causality and causal inference have emerged as core research areas at the interface of modern statistics and domains including biomedical sciences, social sciences, computer science, and beyond. The…

arxiv.org

I recommended a rejection of a paper because a key reference, mentioned 7 times as a closely related work with a similar methodology, simply does not exist. It was supposedly written by some plausible authors, with a plausible title, in a plausible journal, but it does not exist. Weird feeling...

My opinion about the historic verdict coming out of Brazil, with @stevelevitsky.bsky.social, is in the @nytimes.com today. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/o...

Opinion | Brazil Just Succeeded Where the U.S. Failed

nytimes.com

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research. This is wrong. And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

Our research was featured on @voxdev.bsky.social! @olihanney.bsky.social, @emaansiddique.bsky.social and the stellar editorial board do a fantastic job in offering curated, accessible materials to the development research community. As a devoted reader, I am very happy to have contributed to it :)

VoxDev@voxdev.bsky.social · last yr.

🆕 Understanding self-employment in Brazil: Can people afford to search for jobs? Today on VoxDev, @tscarelli.bsky.social and David Margolis show that material scarcity and financial constraints appear to be the main drivers of self-employment in Brazil: voxdev.org/topic/labour...

📢Applications are open for two Nuffield Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Economics, starting Sept 2026. A unique chance to pursue independent research at Oxford in a supportive, well-resourced environment. Deadline: 30 Sept 2025 Find out more: bit.ly/4mcMxSR #AcademicJobs #OxfordEconomics

Teaching or studying economics? This blog is for you... @emaansiddique.bsky.social and I have updated @voxdev.bsky.social's series of blogs showcasing how economists use different econometric techniques to answer interesting and important policy questions. Read here: voxdev.org/topic/exampl...

Examples from development economics for your introduction to econometrics course

Economists employ a wide range of econometric methods when conducting research. Here are some examples of how these techniques are used to generate interesting and useful policy insights in developmen...

voxdev.org

The new PSE Alumni platform is online! Connect with 3,500+ graduates of Paris School of Economics, explore job offers, attend exclusive events, and stay up to date with alumni insights. Join the network 👇 www.pse-alumni.org/en/

PSE Alumni

PSE Alumni, the online community of members of Paris School of Economics

pse-alumni.org

Looking to work at the intersection of research and policy in development? Friends of VoxDev are hiring for 4 important roles in the evidence-to-policy ecosystem. Check them out below 🧵1/5

About 2/3 of all own-account workers in Brazil appear to have taken this occupation as a result of a financial constraint, as opposed to their first-best economic choice. This is the key finding of a paper I co-authored with David Margolis, now in EDCC: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Yeah, I don't think you can ask reviewers to go through the code/replicate results, unless you pay them appropriately. I think a better equilibrium than the status quo would be: people write fewer papers & receive fewer papers to review, are paid to do so, and spend more time on it, including code.

Very happy to see this out! This is a major revision relative to the previous issue. We have included important topics such as minimum wages, migration, and market power. Plus, it now also covers housing informality! Check it out!

VoxDev@voxdev.bsky.social · last yr.

What have we learned about the informal sector? Issue 2 of our #VoxDevLit on Informality by @GUlyssea, Matteo Bobba, @lgadenne.bsky.social & Mariaflavia Harari is out now! ➡️ voxdev.org/voxdevlit/in... Today's podcast covers the update ➡️ voxdev.org/topic/labour...