From @economist.com

Very excited to be starting as a faculty member at NovaSBE, along with 9 other lovely members of the crew! Looking forward to meeting all my fantastic colleagues in Lisbon

Fantastic article by Oliver Kim about how to think about GDP measures across long stretches of history (it's hard!) asteriskmag.com/issues/11/gd...

On one hand, reducing car use reduces urban pollution. But on the other, everyone likes it and cities become more livable

A 4-year limit on student visa length would upend PhD programs.

🌟 Opportunity: Policy Associate for an incredible project in Madagascar 🇲🇬 Our team is hiring a policy associate to support the Ministry of Education in scaling Kilonga - an evidence-based program that improves learning and combats menstrual stigma, reaching 712,000 students. tinyurl.com/madapolicy

We're hiring for a short-term (mid-Sept to mid-Dec) role as a field RA on an RCT about rural healthcare in northern Uganda. Must have fieldwork experience and ideally experience in Uganda/East Africa. Please share with anyone who might be interested.

🎙️ In a recent @voxdev.bsky.social talk, NOVAFRICA Scientific Director @catiabatista.bsky.social & Caroline Theoharides discuss key findings from their @science.org paper: “Brain Drain or Brain Gain? The Impact of High-Skilled Migration on Origin Countries.” 🔗 voxdev.org/topic/migrat...

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers. The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

Since 2000, Gavi has helped get vaccines to 1.1 billion children. The U.S. announced that, after this year, it’s pulling out all its money. If that happens, Gavi estimates that 75 million children will miss vaccinations over the next five years—and of those, 1.2 million children will die.​

According to a UNAIDS analysis, ending PEPFAR-supported programs for people living with HIV could result in an additional 4.2 million deaths by 2029: b-gat.es/4lbD4Lw

USAID has spent $2 billion supporting vaccines through GAVI. In research, published in AEJ:Economic Policy, Kartini Shastry and I find GAVI saved 1.5 million lives at a low cost of $9,000 per child saved. See the writeup of our research in VoxDev: voxdev.org/topic/health...

The global vaccine campaign GAVI saved 1.5 million lives so far, as economists @dantortorice.bsky.social and Kartini Shastry have shown. Now the US Administration, captured by anti-vaccine zealots, will cancel *all* funding for GAVI. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/h... An act of mass death.

This is a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of @gavi.org. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1B children, & averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year - and RFK Jr will be personally responsible. www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

The CBO has analyzed the distributional impacts of H.R. 1, a.k.a. the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Household resources for the bottom income decile would fall by 4% ($1,600), largely due to Medicaid & SNAP cuts. The top income decile will see increases of 2.3% ($12,000), largely due to tax cuts.

At Princeton today to celebrate the career of the brilliant and generous Janet Currie, a pioneer in the economics of children. I and the many researchers in this audience wouldn't be where we are if not for her mentorship.

This post estimates that proposed USAID cuts will cost almost a million lives www.cgdev.org/blog/millio...

Work with me and my star coauthors (Patrick Agte & Pascaline Dupas) on AI & health! We're recruiting a full-time, Hindi-speaking field research associate to work on our project in Rajasthan. Please share and apply. jpalsouth.asia/jobsPage?ID=... #econtwitter #econsky #econra

Nature ran a piece finding that 25 million people could die as a result of ending USAID. This puts Trump and Musk in the category of the most brutal leaders of the 20th century in terms of unnecessary lives lost. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Poland’s GDP per capita has more than doubled since it joined the European Union in 2004

Short, timely, important, and informative piece by Rohini Pande on the economic costs of ending DEI. www.science.org/doi/full/10....

The obliteration of this survey is a terrible loss to social science.

🧵 (1/6) ‪Tax Policy Center, @budgetlab.bsky.social‬@taxpolicycenter, and PennWharton all have new analyses of the House bill; they paint a remarkable picture of a starkly regressive bill. Cuts to Medicaid/SNAP exacerbate the regressive pattern of the tax increases, making quite a picture.

Come and work with me in lovely Lisbon! I’m hiring a full-time predoc research associate to work on exciting projects on discrimination, AI and health, and social media use in LMICs. Please share and apply! #econra #econtwitter #econsky tinyurl.com/novapredoc

All the evidence is that Gemini 2.5 Pro represents a new level of LLM that is much more capable than any released model, including other big reasoners. It got 24.4% on the Math Olympiad test that every other model bombed last week, for example. I am very curious to see the system card. matharena.ai

Each dot represents 10 people whose lives depend on US foreign aid, just for HIV prevention & treatment. Without it, 1.6m people could die *per year*.

Is it fascism? dgardner.substack.com/p/is-it-fasc...

Every day, PEPFAR helps about 430 pregnant women get an H.I.V. diagnosis... If PEPFAR’s work remains interrupted for the full 90-day foreign aid pause, an estimated 136,000 babies will be infected with H.I.V. at birth who otherwise would not be. h/t Leah Libresco www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/o...

One thing I admired Americans for was they provided efficient and effective aid for people around the world. I thought this made America great. The PEPFAR program saved plausibly about 25 million lives and prevented at least 5.5 million babies from being born with HIV. See: pepfarreport.org

A blog on the PEPFAR pause. I hope Secretary Rubio protects the legacy he helped build. www.cgdev.org/blog/legacy-...

Absolutely, and thanks @corinnelow.bsky.social. Putting my past @brookings.edu piece on the importance of PEPFAR funding here: www.brookings.edu/articles/pep...

Are any economists interested in organizing a letter on PEPFAR? On how essential it has been, what knock on infrastructure it has created, and how devastating even a short pause can be? @belindaarch.bsky.social

PEPFAR, started by George W. Bush, has saved more than 25 million lives worldwide. 600,000 people would die over the next decade in South Africa alone, which relies on PEPFAR for only 20% of its H.I.V. budget. Some countries are almost entirely dependent on the program.

This will kill so many people living with HIV who depend on PEPFAR programs to stay on their HIV treatment driving further HIV drug resistance. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/u...

New research alert! Our study investigates the effectiveness of human-only, AI-assisted, and AI-led teams in assessing the reproducibility of quantitative social science research. We've got some surprising findings!

Even though I hate the "this one simple trick" discourse... Adding this to all my LLM prompts has made them SO much more useful: "Before starting the task, please ask me clarifying questions to make sure you understand how to complete the task effectively."

In economics, editors, referees, and authors often behave as if a published paper should reflect some kind of authoritative consensus. As a result, valuable debate happens in secret, and the resulting paper is an opaque compromise with anonymous co-authors called referees. 1/

We've significantly updated our paper on modeling + measuring systemic discrimination! Check it out: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ab5yx... (cc @aleximas.bsky.social + @aislinnbohren.bsky.social!) A short 🧵 on what's new...

Our paper "Local knowledge, formal evidence, and policy decisions" (with Aidan Coville and @sampada.bsky.social) is out at the JDE. Many people have the intuition that policymakers prefer evidence from their own context. To what extent is this true? 1/ 🧵

Excited that this work in Madagascar with has been featured in VoxDev! @voxdev.bsky.social

Great work by Oeindrila Dube, Sandy Jo MacArthur, and Anuj Shah

PEPFAR is one of the most successful foreign policy programs in US history and US-Africa relations. Yet it's at risk of not being funded come March 2025. Wrote a piece on why Congress should fund PEPFAR in @brookingsinst.bsky.social: www.brookings.edu/articles/pep...

🚨 New Blog! 🚨 GDP is everywhere in development. But in Zambia in 2010, the national accounts were prepared by just one (1!) person. How much can we trust developing country GDP? A 🧵 and post on Morten Jerven's 2013 classic, Poor Numbers, on how African GDP is actually made—

Today's job market post by @duncanwebb.bsky.social looks at how conversations between majority group members about a minority (in this case transgender workers in India) can reduce discrimination - blogs.worldbank.org/impactevalua...