This week we featured research on trapped workers, better managers, building roads and more!
We are happy to announce the launch of VoxDev's second podcast, Ideas in Development. In the first episode, Oliver Hanney explains the thought process behind starting a new podcast, and previews some of the upcoming series.
Ishan Nath discusses how climate change is likely to keep more labour in agriculture in the very regions where agricultural productivity suffers most, exacerbating the ‘food problem’ just as economies would benefit most from diversifying away from agriculture.
In Mexico, management pays but in weak business environments the payoff is too small and too uncertain. Nicholas Bloom, Leonardo Iacovone, Mariana Pereira-López, and John Van Reenen find that better management improves firm efficiency, but a range of factors limit well-managed firms from expanding and gaining market share – reducing firms’ incentives to upgrade their practices.
Oliver Vanden Eynde and Liam Wren-Lewis examine the complementary effects of infrastructure programmes in rural India. They find that villages with both electricity and road access experience a greater increase in dry-season cropping than those with only one type of infrastructure. Joint infrastructure provision further boosted rural welfare by improving asset accumulation and consumption.
In Pakistan, Sher Afghan Asad, Husnain Fateh Ahmad, and Hadia Majid ran a large-scale audit study on Facebook Marketplace using fictitious buyer profiles in order to examine how gender discrimination manifests itself in an online marketplace. Although there was no evidence of price discrimination or differences in product quality, they found that female buyers received substantially more unsolicited contact than male buyers across a wide range of communication channels, including phone calls, text messages, and WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
Millions of children in low- and middle-income countries attend school without learning to read, with ineffective teaching methods driving a global learning crisis. In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Benjamin Piper discusses new global evidence that demonstrates how effective reading instruction can transform literacy outcomes and unlock long-term economic growth.
In India, Priyadarshi Amar, Sumitra Badrinathan, Simon Chauchard, and Florian Sichart delivered the first experimental evaluation of a sustained, classroom-based media literacy curriculum aimed at countering misinformation. Overall, the intervention was highly effective, with the largest effects on accuracy discernment: the ability to tell true from false news.
How can women translate new household resources into gains in agency? In Kenya, Mahreen Mahmud, Emma Riley, and Kate Orkin studied this question experimentally by pairing an unconditional cash transfer with an aspirations workshop designed to expose women to successful female role models. Their results suggest a simple but powerful insight: economic opportunity matters, but timing psychological empowerment with it is key for improving women’s outcomes.
Amateur football clubs in Latin America show no overall discrimination against immigrants, but treatment varies sharply by origin, with players from lower-ranked football countries facing fewer positive responses – driven largely by perceived player quality rather than language or integration signals. Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez, Gwen-Jirō Clochard, Helmut Dietl, and Juan Cruz Duhalde explain.
In a two-part blog, Abdoulaye Ndiaye discusses everything you need to know about a PhD in economics, and what economists actually do – explaining the six broad categories of economists across academia, policy, and the private sector.
And here are some interesting links from over the break:
- Richard Baldwin has stepped down after 18 years of editing VoxEU. Without VoxEU there would be no VoxDev, so a huge thank you from us! He has reflected on his time in this post.
- Two must read posts by Ken Opalo, reflecting on 2025 in Africa, and previewing 2026 on the continent.
- Jishnu Das discusses what effective system reform looks like with the Central Square Foundation.
- Founders Pledge are hiring a Senior Education Grantmaker - very cool and high impact opportunity!
- The Transfer Project has a series of evidence summaries and briefs on the impacts of government-led social cash transfer programmes in Africa.
- IFPRI has a new practical political economy blog series on what really drives food policy decisions.
- Daniel Björkegren: AI is transforming the economy — and studying it will require fresh approaches.
- Judd Devermont has a useful post on think tanks.