This week we featured research on inequality, pollution, daughters, investment and more...
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We are excited to announce that David Lagakos and Joana Naritomi have joined our Editorial Board! And a huge thank you to Stefano Caria, who is stepping back, for his work over the past two years.
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In China, Mengdi Liu, Mark Buntaine, Sarah Anderson, and Bing Zhang demonstrate that government transparency helps bridge gaps between environmental laws and actual practices, improving health and environmental quality broadly.
Although sex ratios at birth remain relatively balanced in sub-Saharan Africa, this does not necessarily imply a lack of son preference. In an analysis of over 100 Demographic and Health Surveys across 34 countries, Garance Genicot and Maria Hernandez-de-Benito reveal that having a firstborn daughter—as opposed to a son—significantly shapes the trajectory of a woman’s life, influencing her marriage prospects, fertility decisions, and economic security.
Since 1990, the gap between the richest and poorest has been narrowing in Brazil. In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Alysson Portella unpacks two decades of data and policy shifts that led to this surprising outcome.
Evidence from Zimbabwe suggests that dialogue-based engagement campaigns can be effective in increasing enrolment and learning, which is consistent with improving perceptions around the value of girls’ education. Chris Cotton, Ardyn Nordstrom, Jordan Nanowski, and Eric Richert discuss that these campaigns can also be offered alongside other more prominent interventions—such as teacher training or literacy programmes—offering a potential cost-effective solution to encouraging women’s education.
Performance-linked contracts, increasingly enabled by financial technology, can better spur investment among small firms than rigid microcredit—especially for risk- and loss-averse business owners. Muhammad Meki assesses the effect of equity-like contracts on investment behaviour among small firms in Kenya and Pakistan.
In Nepal, Eric Edmonds, Priya Mukherjee, Nikhilesh Prakash, Nishith Prakash, and Shwetlena Sabarwal find that face-to-face counselling for adolescents improved mental well-being; translating these gains into better schooling outcomes proves more difficult.
Caroline Krafft outlines evidence from an experiment in Egypt tested for employment discrimination by sex and marital status, finding no sizeable discrimination against married women.
In-person household surveys measuring women’s empowerment encounter difficulties collecting data on sensitive questions, particularly those related to domestic violence. In Ethiopia, Aditi Kadam, Ellen McCullough, Tamara McGavock, and Nicholas Magnan reveal minimal differences, if any, between phone vs. in-person surveys or male vs. female enumerators, offering reassurance to survey efforts with thin budgets.
Friends of VoxDev are hiring!
- The International Growth Centre is hiring an Economics Editor.
- The new Practical Politics Platform are recruiting for two core roles - an exciting opportunity to shape a new public good making political economy accessible and impactful! Political Econ Specialist here, Program Manager here.
- Yale Economic Growth Center is hiring for a Director of Communications.
- J-PAL are hiring a Policy Manager to the Global Executive Director.
Elsewhere in development:
- John Floretta and Claire Walsh discuss how smarter development starts with evidence in J-PAL's evidence effect series.
- Dani Rodrik and Rohan Sandhu discuss how countries can raise productivity in services.
- Explore stories of impact and influence of 3ie's work on programs, organizations and on the evidence ecosystem on the Impact Stories Dashboard.
- 3ie are seeking to collaborate with research centres in LMIC's to conduct systematic reviews and evidence syntheses.
- Ken Opalo writes about how development practice (and institutions) should approach the coming reforms in the aid sector.
- Zainab Usman outlines how USAID's demise is an opportunity to prioritise industrialisation over charity.
- Rachel Glennerster and Lee Crawfurd highlight four criteria for prioritising education funds.
- Shahrukh Wani discusses how governments can improve their use of data.
- Catch up on CGD's First Annual Research Conference on Global Lead Exposure.
- Rachel Glennerster, Indermit Gill and Danny Quah write about development in the age of populism, ahead of this year's ABCDE 2025 conference.
- Mission 300: Partnering to Unlock Private Investment - Interesting video from the World Bank.
- A new growth brief from IGC - Sustainable Pakistan: Addressing climate-driven demands and fiscal challenges for electricity.
- Interesting interview on the asterisk magazine with Robert Rosenbaum - How to Triage Billions in Aid Cuts.
- Cool blog post about how talent-focused policies in Hangzhou fueled a high-tech revolution.
- Fatema Z. Sumar on why US foreign aid needs development diplomats.
And Deputy Managing Editor Emaan Siddique discusses school violence and menstrual health interventions.