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Blog Post
May 24, 2024
This has been a week of extremes for me: I spent the first part of the week basking in sunshine in Barcelona for a (very good) conference, meeting people from around the world working on interesting problems, eating incredibly good food and enjoying one of the more walkable cities I’ve visited. And ...
Blog Post
May 17, 2024
It was a long, hard slog, and there have been a number of setbacks (not least days on end of merciless grey skies and rain), but London has finally settled into a real, actual summer. That means two things: first, everyone is in a ridiculously good mood. We get three weeks of sunshine a year, and it...
Blog Post
May 14, 2024
Richer aging countries need educated young workers to provide the services and entrepreneurial talent to sustain their quality of life. A growing population of young, increasingly educated people in poorer countries, and especially in Africa, need good jobs and greater opportunities. More trade in s...
Blog Post
May 10, 2024
It was hit-and-miss for a while—there were a good few weeks when I thought the UK would just completely forego spring and summer and transition directly from winter into autumn—but there are tentative signs of summer in London. London in the summer is a bit like a bird that spends 11 months of the y...
Blog Post
May 08, 2024
Managing pandemics is not just about halting the spread of disease—it's about striking a careful balance between preserving public health and minimizing disruptions to daily life and well-being. Crafting effective policies in such situations requires a deep understanding of factors including how the...
Blog Post
May 03, 2024
One of the things I missed last week was Jishnu Das’s excellent, heartfelt piece about the state of development economics. But he’s not talking about causal identification or taking potshots in the war on randomization, but about the deeper values that he suggests have gone missing from the discipli...
Blog Post
May 03, 2024
Global health is fundamentally undermined by power imbalances. Those who have the least access to health care, generally, have the least power to influence global health. This blog looks at one imbalance—the concentration of power in the hands of global health donors, in relation to governments and ...
Blog Post
April 26, 2024
The links are back after a two-and-a-half week break in Argentina, and to be honest, my brain is still not fully re-engaged. Argentina is a hard place to be an economist: announcing your profession begets many questions, some of them hostile, and all of them difficult. It’s an amazing place: friendl...
Blog Post
April 05, 2024
These links, the second since our makeover, are exceptional in another way: I’m writing them on a Wednesday evening, and they’ll be sent out some time on Friday by my brilliant colleagues in communications. I don’t normally write these ahead of time: they’re drafted directly into an email, with the ...
WORKING PAPERS
April 04, 2024
Star firms, defined as the top 10 percentile of firms in the world in terms of return on invested capital, are more likely to occur in high-income countries and manufacturing industry, but there is an increasing share of star firms from middle-income countries and the services sector. Star firms hav...