This week we featured research on pollution, social norms, gender pay gaps, poverty and more...
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Gemma Dipoppa and Saad Gulzar present evidence from India and Pakistan showing how harnessing district officials’ local pollution incentives reduces crop fires by up to 14.5% and deters burns by a further 13%, significantly lowering infant and child mortality.
In settings where reliable data on poverty is difficult to come by, non-traditional data sources such as mobile phone metadata has the potential to fill data gaps. Emily Aiken, Suzanne Bellue, Joshua Blumenstock, Dean Karlan, and Christopher Udry present research on a cash transfer programme in Togo, revealing that mobile phone data enabled accurate targeting but was less effective for impact evaluation.
Can an intermediate, less severe action serve as a stepping stone to eliminating a harmful norm? Selim Gulesci, Sam Jindani, Eliana La Ferrara, David Smerdon, Munshi Sulaiman, and Peyton Young outline evidence on female genital cutting in Somalia, suggesting that the intermediate action risks becoming the new norm.
In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Amber Peterman presents new evidence on the effectiveness of edutainment—educational entertainment—as a tool to reduce violence against women and children. Drawing from her recent review, Peterman unpacks the research on how media interventions can shift attitudes and behaviours in powerful ways.
Marina Bassi, Bruno Besbas, Lelys Dinarte-Diaz, Saravana Ravindran, and Ana Reynoso find that a cost-effective at-scale preschool construction programme improved development outcomes of primary-school age children living in extreme deprivation in Mozambique.
In North Macedonia, Alex Armand, Pedro Carneiro, Federico Tagliati, and Yiming Xia study a government-led programme combining wage subsidies with matching services to decrease long-term unemployment among vulnerable jobseekers—which significantly improved formal employment in this population.
Olivia Bertelli, Thomas Calvo, Emmanuelle Lavallée, Marion Mercier, and Sandrine Mesplé-Somps find that combining direct questions with list experiments can help deduce men’s true perspectives on gender-based violence in Mali.
In South Africa, Ihsaan Bassier and Leila Gautham show that half of the gender pay gap comes from women sorting into low-paying firms, with low formality and high churn being key to understanding this dynamic.
Economists employ a wide range of econometric methods when conducting research. In a recent blog, we compile some examples of how these techniques are used to generate interesting and useful policy insights in development economics.
Our library of 16 VoxDevLits, alongside summarising the evidence we do have, identifies important policy-relevant questions for which more evidence is needed. In this blog, Oliver Hanney has collated the key unanswered questions in development economics identified by the teams behind our VoxDevLits.
Elsewhere in development:
- Zainab Usman delivered a keynote on Africa's Growth & Position in the Global Economy.
- Lee Crawfurd writes on the economic returns to foundational literacy and numeracy in Indonesia.
- On Our World in Data, Bertha Rohenkohl and Pablo Arriagada outline how the World Bank classifies countries by income.
- Johan Fourie discusses why policymakers need economic historians, particularly for the AI debate.
- On Sean Carroll's mindscape: Edward Miguel on the Developing Practice of Development Economics.
- On IFPRI, Tushar Singh and Himangshu Kumar write about using large language models to code survey responses in native languages.
- On IDB - From human counselors to AI agents: What We Learned From Scaling Career Guidance in Chile.
- Ian Mitchell and Sam Hughes write about how the UK should focus its aid in 2026.
- The Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics 2025, Development in the Age of Populism, starts next week!
And some opportunities:
- SSRC have announced their Economic Research Rescue Fund - Emergency grants of up to $250,000 available to economics-related research projects that have had NSF funding terminated.
- Four new roles at the Gates Foundation Global Education Team.
- Malengo are hiring a Chief Investment Officer.
- The What Works Hub for Global Education are hiring a Senior Programme Manager.
- Raise for Good have a list of social impact jobs.