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Top Hits: A Round-Up of Dave Evans’ 100+ Blogs at CGD

by
The CGD Education Team
November 14, 2023

After four and a half years at CGD, our senior fellow Dave Evans is embarking on a new and exciting adventure. But we couldn’t let him go without sending him off with what is becoming a Dave tradition: a round-up of his blogs in the past years!

Aside from his numerous journal publications (the most recent of which are here, here, and here), and working papers (here, here, and here are the latest), Dave excels in delivering blog posts that delve deep on issues of girl’s education, teachers, and gender and health in concise—but still crystal clear—form. Let’s dive in!

Our sample

Over half of Dave’s 103 (and counting) blog posts are on education (Figure 1), ranging from teacher professional development, to the impact on girls’ education of interventions that don’t target girls, to foundational literacy and numeracy, to violence in schools, and many more. A solid dozen of his blog posts offered insights during the COVID-19 pandemic: from the regular updates on the economic impact of the pandemic in low and middle-income countries, to the specific impact of COVID-19 on women and girls, and the medium-term effect on students one and two years after schools first closed their doors. The next big category are rounds-ups and micro-summaries, which showcases two of Dave’s super powers: reading a lot of content at lightning speed a la “The Flash” but for papers, and his ability to effectively distill them to short sound bites while still staying faithful to the content. (His twitter threads showcase this off excellently as well — if you’re not following him there, you’re missing a lot of fun!). For the conference roundups which are micro-summaries of 100+ papers, he does a series for the NEUDC (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023) and the CSAE (2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023), which he starts a couple weeks before the conference dates themselves, so that by the time that conference even begins, the blog post is already making its way to the world through the publishing team. He also wrote superb blog posts to highlight the excellent work of fellow economists (Nobel Prize Laureates Abhijit Banerjee, Duflo, and Michael Kremer, and a tribute to the late economist Martin Ravallion).

Figure 1. A majority of Dave’s blog posts are on education, followed by pandemic posts and his much-anticipated conference and publications round-ups.

Greatest hits!

Altogether, Dave’s blogs have reached almost half a million views. Out of all these blog posts, which ones are the fan favorites? Most in demand are his regular round-ups of the latest on the economic impacts of the pandemic blog posts, his “how to”s in writing economic papers including abstracts, and the blog post on the launch of CGD’s Girls’ Education and Women’s Equality report which he co-wrote.

In descending order of number of views:

Figure 2. Dave’s blog posts have been viewed nearly 500,000 times. These are his most-viewed posts.

Beyond the papers and blog posts

Anyone who knows Dave knows he is much, much more than the sum of his papers and blog posts (as informative and helpful those are!) and we pay homage to Dave’s many contributions beyond economics:

  • He loves watching and sharing about the movies he enjoyed. Last year, he watched movies from 100 countries and he put together a map of the countries, a list of reviews of movies, and his top ten picks here!
  • Books? You bet! In 2019, Dave read a book from each of Africa’s 54 countries and posted—you guessed it—a map and reviews!
  • Exercise: Dave has maintained a streak of running at least 1 mile every single day since near the start of the pandemic. Many of these runs have graced staff meetings.
  • He is always full of energy and positivity which never fails to brighten the day of everyone he encounters.
  • He has been an incredibly supportive and generous mentor to many of us—we’re going to miss him.

We wish him well in his new adventure, and we look forward to more amazing Dave stuff—tweets, blog posts, papers, movie updates alike—and hopefully welcome him back at CGD as opportunities in the future allow. 

Disclaimer

CGD blog posts reflect the views of the authors, drawing on prior research and experience in their areas of expertise. CGD is a nonpartisan, independent organization and does not take institutional positions.

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