Economics & Marginalia: November 12, 2021

Hi all,

Cricket eh? I was *this far* from celebrating a famous Pakistan win over Australia when Matthew Wade decided to make mince meat out of the best bowler in T20 cricket; meanwhile, I messaged a colleague to tell her that England were 9 overs from the World Cup final once again when Jimmy Neesham twirled his moustache and put the spoilers on the game. (It’s nice to lead with the good side of cricket, rather than the continuing omnishambles that is Yorkshire CCC, continuing to completely screw up the absolute basics of not being institutionally Islamophobic and racist). The final is going to be an Antipodean humdinger.

1. That’s not the only thing we have to look forward to right now: we’re also smack-dab in the middle of the most wonderful time of year: the Development Impact job market papers series! Every year the DI crew give over their blog to some of the most interesting econ PhDs to blog about the centrepiece paper of their doctorate. And every time, it features some of the most interesting, brilliant work you’ll read all year. They kick off this year with a paper that uses an Indian natural experiment to show that opening bank branches in under-served areas can increase household health, in part through the ability of healthcare providers to access loans. Another studies the economic costs of celebrations (what I call the Aaye Laariye problem) by studying quinceañeras in Latin America, finding that quinceañera does indeed put the hurt on poor families; and the most recent finds that putting videos in voting stations doesn’t reduce fraud (it merely displaces it to nearby stations), but it does reduce perceptions of fraud, which is probably a lose-lose use of public money.
2. The rapidly-expanding field of bureaucracies and development outcomes gets a really good VoxEU summary written, in part, by the incoming FCDO Chief Economist, Adnan Khan—on which note, enormous congratulations to all concerned! I was working in what was then DFID when I first came across Adnan’s research, and his experience as a bureaucrat and a top-class economist will hold him in really good stead at FCDO.
3. COP26 is (maybe) drawing to a close, though these things tend to run long (or just end unfinished, like an economics seminar full of interruptions). Predictably, it’s been full of ‘big round number announcements’ of the kind which enormously wind me up: huge sums of money being promised or demanded but with virtually no detail on what they will do, when they will come or who will benefit from them. In a new CGD paper, I propose a solution: instead of focusing on the inputs, focus on the problem we want to solve. A pull financing mechanism that works on climate issues that need specific developing country solutions can thread the needle of doing something that’s good for development, an efficient use of ODA (which seems to fund all the big COP announcements) and make some dent in climate problems. We’ll be following up with a more detailed paper on specific applications soon. Watch this space.
4. More great stuff from CGD: Nancy Birdsall captures the deep ambivalence we should be feeling about taking booster shots when so much of the world hasn’t had any access to vaccines at all; and Dave Evans and Almedina Music do the magic trick of summarising almost 200 NEUDC papers in one sentence each. I’ve now run out of superlatives for this routine performance of the extraordinary. Just read it.
5. Econ has a gender problem, we know that (and a VoxEU piece by Rigissa Megalokonomou and co-authors suggest what this costs the discipline); a tweetstorm by Anna Stansbury shows that it also has a class problem which intersects with, but is distinct from, its well-documented race and gender problems.
6. The other alleged most wonderful time of year is Christmas (this is wrong, it’s the DI job market paper series, definitely); Tim Harford discusses how the rampant consumerism it gives rise to isn’t limited by some upper limit of Christmas spirit. Instead, the longer the lead-in to Christmas, the more we spend on it. And yet, no-one has yet bought me a Sal Bae meal. I’m outraged.
7. I usually close the links with something funny, or heartwarming (if you consider a compilation of every swearword Samuel L. Jackson has ever uttered ‘heartwarming’, as I do); today I break with tradition. This excerpt from Michael Ignatieff’s new book, On Consolation, is mainly bleak except for that small spark of humanity that he’s focusing on. But if it leads people to two of my favourite authors, Anna Akhmatova and Primo Levi, who he writes about here, then it has to be the last link. Enjoy, but have chocolate nearby.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

R