This week we featured research on pollution, renewable energy, mobile money, sleep & more...
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In African cities, small firms locate on busy roads to attract customers and increase profits. Vittorio Bassi, Matthew E. Kahn, Nancy Lozano Gracia, Tommaso Porzio, and Jeanne Sorin show how this exposes workers to substantial air pollution.
Danae Hernández-Cortés and Sophie-Marie Mathes find that the development of the wind energy sector in Brazil improved employment in recipient municipalities—with workers under the age of 40 and those without high school degrees benefitting the most.
In Brazil, Ridwan Karim highlights how tackling voter fraud not only protected election integrity, but also enhanced political accountability, improved leadership quality, and promoted better governance outcomes.
In this week’s two-part VoxDevTalks special, Francis Annan discusses his extensive research on mobile money markets in Ghana, as well as his personal experience partnering with businesses—and eventually policymakers—on this research.
Unlike Western Europe, Russia entrenched serfdom as an extractive institution rooted in frontier defence, as opposed to fundamentals such as land abundance and trade. To secure its southern border, the state granted land to servicemen who leveraged their strategic role to restrict peasant mobility. Andrea Matranga and Timur Natkhov discuss how this hardwired coercion into law and shaped Russia’s long-term institutional landscape.
In Indonesia, Claire Duquennois and Maulik Jagnani find that cash transfers improve sleep quality for household heads but not other family members, revealing how financial pressures burden those responsible for providing.
Thiago Scarelli and David Margolis find that material scarcity and financial constraints appear to be the main drivers of self-employment for approximately two-thirds of urban own-account workers in Brazil.
Elsewhere in development, it was tough to keep up!
- Dean Karlan discusses fixing foreign aid on the excellent Statecraft podcast.
- Arjun Ramani has an excellent write up - Dispatches from India, What I learned covering the world's biggest country for The Economist.
- Kurtis Lockhart on the Asterisk makes the convincing case for African policy to focus on cities ahead of a huge wave of urban population growth.
- Oliver Kim explores how Indonesia climbed the value chain for nickel.
- On OWID, Hannah Ritchie and Fiona Spooner discuss how the world can finish the fight against tuberculosis.
- On the In Common Podcast, Saad Gulzar discusses the politics of development in South Asia.
- Why is the global energy access debate so confused? 15 facts about energy and how people use it by Todd Moss.
- By Ken Opalo - A historical political economy of Kenya.
- David McKenzie outlines his practical tips for designing and analyzing powerful experiments.
- Researchers value null results, but struggle to publish them - by Laurie Udesky on nature.
- Also on the Dev Impact WB Blog, how to strengthen evidence aggregation by Lelys Dinarte-Diaz & Alaka Holla
- From the Flywheel Economics Podcast: Titi Ojo on building the voice of Nigeria's non-oil exporters.
- ACLED has a lovely new look website.
- Hanan Morsy: To attract investors, Africa must smash economic stereotypes.
- On WEF: How Africa is harnessing technology to leapfrog towards green growth by Anthony Cano Moncada
And lots of interesting jobs:
- CSAE is hiring for three roles in the PROSPER research programme – a global initiative tackling employment barriers in low- and middle-income countries.
- Check out the J-PAL Jobs Newsletter for July.
- ADB are hiring a Director for the Macroeconomics Research Division.
- CGD are hiring a Policy Fellow or Senior Policy Fellow for the US Development Policy Initiative.
- The Works in Progress newsletter is hiring a daily newsletter writer.