I wanted dinner recommendations so I scraped 13,000+ London restaurants and accidentally discovered Google Maps is running a shadow economy. Anyway here's a dashboard and a political economy thesis: open.substack.com/pub/laurenle...

1. In Hamburg there is a "fully autonomous train" that for some reason has a human operator to press the ON switch first thing in the morning and the OFF switch at the end of the night. In a recent talk about AI in science, I asked the audience to consider whether they want to be like that operator.

Why impact evaluations are so important: not everything that sounds like a good policy actually has the desired impact. While many interventions are highly effective, others don't work at all:

"Humans aren’t very efficient movers—until you put us on a bicycle, when we become some of the most energy-efficient land travelers in the animal kingdom." www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-hu...

What does a Nobel Prize on ‘innovation-driven economic growth’ actually reward? A historian’s perspective on how to deal with the Nobel frenzy beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2025/10/13/w...

Or, "no one wanted to look at this thing because it's a hot, hot mess, and finally I did, and guess what? It's a hot, hot mess."

Reading rec: "Challenges in Statistics: A Dozen Challenges in Causality and Causal Inference" arxiv.org/abs/2508.17099 Great overview of both the state of the art and open question in causal inference!

I recommended a rejection of a paper because a key reference, mentioned 7 times as a closely related work with a similar methodology, simply does not exist. It was supposedly written by some plausible authors, with a plausible title, in a plausible journal, but it does not exist. Weird feeling...

My opinion about the historic verdict coming out of Brazil, with @stevelevitsky.bsky.social, is in the @nytimes.com today. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/o...

1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research. This is wrong. And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.

Our research was featured on @voxdev.bsky.social! @olihanney.bsky.social, @emaansiddique.bsky.social and the stellar editorial board do a fantastic job in offering curated, accessible materials to the development research community. As a devoted reader, I am very happy to have contributed to it :)

📢Applications are open for two Nuffield Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Economics, starting Sept 2026. A unique chance to pursue independent research at Oxford in a supportive, well-resourced environment. Deadline: 30 Sept 2025 Find out more: bit.ly/4mcMxSR #AcademicJobs #OxfordEconomics

Teaching or studying economics? This blog is for you... @emaansiddique.bsky.social and I have updated @voxdev.bsky.social's series of blogs showcasing how economists use different econometric techniques to answer interesting and important policy questions. Read here: voxdev.org/topic/exampl...

The new PSE Alumni platform is online! Connect with 3,500+ graduates of Paris School of Economics, explore job offers, attend exclusive events, and stay up to date with alumni insights. Join the network 👇 www.pse-alumni.org/en/

Looking to work at the intersection of research and policy in development? Friends of VoxDev are hiring for 4 important roles in the evidence-to-policy ecosystem. Check them out below 🧵1/5

About 2/3 of all own-account workers in Brazil appear to have taken this occupation as a result of a financial constraint, as opposed to their first-best economic choice. This is the key finding of a paper I co-authored with David Margolis, now in EDCC: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Yeah, I don't think you can ask reviewers to go through the code/replicate results, unless you pay them appropriately. I think a better equilibrium than the status quo would be: people write fewer papers & receive fewer papers to review, are paid to do so, and spend more time on it, including code.

Very happy to see this out! This is a major revision relative to the previous issue. We have included important topics such as minimum wages, migration, and market power. Plus, it now also covers housing informality! Check it out!

Important insight from Stefan Dercon (@gamblingondev.bsky.social): "design interventions that maximise the policy makers’ objective function given their constraints". Economics meets Political Science.

Just posted updated version of our DID textbook! We now have drafts of all chapters, including the one on general designs! Now you can tell your friends still on X that they are DID-outdated :-) Happy easter for those of you that celebrate it. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

We have just opened the 2026 CSAE Fellowship scheme. We host and support rising African scholars for 3 months at Oxford. This year we had five scholars visiting. See the application process here www.csae.ox.ac.uk/visiting-fel....

How do you distinguish a good theory from a not-so-good one?

After extensively studying the strategies implemented by Bolsonaro's government to undermine public administration, I can confidently assert that these tactics follow a tested playbook. This approach has been employed by various governments globally and is now being adopted by the Trump admin. +

We can now easily access over 18,000 geospatial datasets instantly, for free. Here's everything you need to know about the Geospatial Data Catalog:

Less than 1 week until the 2025 deadline to apply for MPhil & DPhil courses in economics at the @oxfordecondept.bsky.social. The CSAE has 2 new scholarships for African postgrad candidates. Find out more & apply by 28 January. www.csae.ox.ac.uk/scholarships #funding #econsky #researchopportunity

I just scribed a summary of how I view policymakers in developing countries generating evidence that they can be confident will lead to successful scaling of their ideas. The wonderful @voxdev.bsky.social was kind enough to publish the piece.

I'm brainstorming for a new course on applied economics and compiling a list of interventions/reforms that had unintended consequences. For example, when Colombia adopted a merit-based hiring system for teachers, student scores declined (Busso et al. 2024). What other cases would you include?

We have put together some of our favourite sources of research, newsletters, articles, blogs, podcasts & videos on development economics, including economists who have written for VoxDev, in this starter pack. VoxDev has had ~2000 authors so let us know if we missed you! go.bsky.app/4rsxm7G

My paper "The Bureaucratic Politics of Urban Land Rights: (Non)Programmatic Distribution in São Paulo’s Land Regularization Policy" was just published in Latin American Politics & Society! doi.org/10.1017/lap.... 🚀