Issue 3 of our #VoxDevLit on Training Entrepreneurs is out now! In this living review, Senior Editors David McKenzie World Bank Research & Christopher Woodruff ODID summarise research on the effectiveness of training entrepreneurs in developing countries: voxdev.org/lits/training-…

I am hiring several pre docs/research assistants in Medellin. RT! Apply! Past RAs have regularly gone on to top-10 PhD programs or to great policy careers. My earliest field RAs are now professors at top universities. Too many pre-docs are US-based and focused on data analysis.

Junto a Chris Blattman y Innovations for Poverty Action estamos contratando varios pre-docs y asociados de investigación para trabajar en Medellín. Varios de nuestros anteriores asociados de investigación hoy están graduados o haciendo doctorados en Princeton, Chicago, Yale, Maryland, entre otras

Government policy efforts on job search and intermediation: what works and what should be done better? Eliana Carranza & I discuss the need to go beyond helping jobseekers find "a" job & instead learning something more fundamental 1/6 blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluati…

But we see a lot of churn in business practices - treated firms stop using many practices they adopted, control firms start doing some, and it seems training sped up temporary adoption of some practices firms might do anyway 6/8

Excited to have my first published paper!

My paper with Eliana Carranza on job training and job search assistance in developing countries is out today in the latest JEP - which also has a nice symposium on taxation and developing countries pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10…

It can be quite time-consuming to do mid- to large-scale non-linear estimation. I wrote a Julia package that does the "plumbing" around GMM: github.com/Gkreindler/GMM… Check it out! (But note it's work in progress.)

Pro-tip: try and put things on the cluster at some point, even if you don't need to. Commit to only using the terminal + git. It forces you to use a makefile and clean folder structure. Periodically use rsync and run the code on the cluster as pseudo-testing.

Excited for Julia, (and DataFramesMeta.jl) to take a larger market share from Stata with a new API for adding labels and notes to data frames.

Most workers in developing countries are self-employed. Would there be transformational gains from organizing them into firms? In this (possibly controversial) paper 👇 we argue “maybe not”. Why? Because there is very small labor specialization even in larger (Ugandan) firms.

LODES data should be organized by MSA, not state. A good undergrad project would be to download the entire LODES database, aggregate by MSA rather than state, then host all the CSVs somewhere and maybe make an API to download (lehdr is great!)

Forthcoming in the AER: "Big Loans to Small Businesses: Predicting Winners and Losers in an Entrepreneurial Lending Experiment" by Gharad Bryan, Dean Karlan, and Adam Osman. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

State and gang rule are sometimes complements in security provision and dispute solving. In Medellín, Colombia, gangs exogenously closer to state presence in 1987 developed more governance over time, suggesting new ways to counter criminal governance. 1/2 👇

Forthcoming in the AER: "The Dynamic Consequences of State-Building: Evidence from the French Revolution" by Cédric Chambru, Emeric Henry, and Benjamin Marx. aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…

Matching frictions and increasing returns to scale in matching between suppliers and buyers drive the agglomeration of economic activity. Revealed by the matching rates after unanticipated supplier bankruptcy and a general equilibrium trade model econometricsociety.org/publications/e…

We find substantial barriers to female LFP and entrepreneurship, esp. when it comes to business expansion, in India. Promoting female entrepreneurship increases FLFP, earnings, and economic growth. Female entrepreneurs hiring women is a key channel econometricsociety.org/publications/e…