Peter Deffebach

What if the train brought the job to you? How public transit moves opportunity closer—and changes who gets hired: Guest post by Akhila Kovvuri

Today's JMP features @akhila-kovvuri.bsky.social's work which shows how the extension of the metro system in Delhi generated new jobs around transit stations. Using staggered DiD, she shows consumer-focused firms move in, with new jobs. Large gain for women. blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?

What have we learned about training entrepreneurs?

Issue 4 of our VoxDevLit on Training Entrepreneurs by @dmckenzie.bsky.social, Christopher Woodruff & Co-Editors is out now!➡️ voxdev.org/voxdevlit/tr...

Today's podcast covers the update➡️ voxdev.org/topic/firms/...

The Economics of Spatial Mobility: Theory and Evidence Using Smartphone Data* ABSTRACT. We develop a tractable quantitative framework for modeling the rich patterns of spatial mobility observed in smartphone data. We show that travel

#QJE Nov 2025, #1, “The Economics of Spatial Mobility: Theory and Evidence Using Smartphone Data,” by Miyauchi, Nakajima, and Redding (@reddingecon.bsky.social): doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

Weekly links June 27: low-income labor markets, ERPs for SMEs, take time to think.

This week was short on links that caught my attention, but here they are: blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

True, but on the other hand I like to be able to ctrl-f for the exact number written in the text in order to find a table.

Credible Numbers: A Procedure for Reporting Statistical Precision in Parameter Estimates Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

this paper is nice www.nber.org/papers/w32124

> we propose a methodology that only reports decimal digits in a parameter estimate that reject a hypothesis of statistical equivalence.

Long-Term and Lasting Impacts of Personal Initiative Training on Entrepreneurial Success (Forthcoming Article) - A randomized experiment in Togo found that personal initiative training for small businesses resulted in large and significant impacts for both men and women after two years. W...

Forthcoming in AER: Insights: "Long-Term and Lasting Impacts of Personal Initiative Training on Entrepreneurial Success" by Francisco Campos, Michael Frese, Leonardo Iacovone, Hillary C. Johnson, David McKenzie, and Mona Mensmann. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

Mean Reversion in RCTs: It may matter for targeting… Mean Reversion in RCTs: It may matter for targeting…

In today's blog, @berkozler12.bsky.social summarizes new work by @marcellaalsan.bsky.social & co-authors on how mean reversion may lower average impacts in RCTs - lots of people being treated may be in a temporary dip that will improve on its own blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

Arizona wins last of 3 planned federal chip research sites, a setback for Oregon and Intel The decision leaves out Oregon, whose leaders hoped a federal research center would anchor a new generation of semiconductor activity in the state.

This is a crushing blow to the future of Oregon's economy. This is the kind of thing where having the second most senior Democrat in the US Senate should really help, but it seems not to have. www.oregonlive.com/silicon-fore...

This means that for other procedural things, like how voting is done, how bills get sent to the floor, etc, the mayor can weigh in and break ties?

h) Miyauchi, @ecmaeditors.bsky.social. Using Japanese firm‐to‐firm transactions panel data, shows rematching following unexpected supplier bankruptcy improves with spatial density of alternative suppliers; this can account for big share of agglomeration benefits t.ly/0TTgV

Thanks! Hope they can come to an agreement. I've been worried there will be lots of tenuous procedural disputes in the opening months

Wait, so Portland created a 12 person council, but the charter didn't explicitly outline how to deal with ties?

Thanks to a good question by @macrodev.bsky.social and inspired by @paulgp.com, I wrote down my Christmas wish for #econsky / #dkøko economists: Learn SQL and teach it to your students 🙏

It will tremendously help your data work and destress your machines. @duckdb.org makes it easy to get started.

Yes that is a good example. Hard to do these specialized joins outside of SQL.

Ultimately, I'm not sure what I want, tbh. I kind of *want* a big binary blob of files that's managed exclusively by a database, but I also want to be able to inspect particular parquet files. It's a trade-off.

So aside from data integrity things (ensuring a structure, matches work seamlessly), it's not obvious how a SQL workflow is good when data is local.

The main problem I have is that our workflow is having a big Dropbox folder holding the data, and a separate git repo with all the code. That is, the data is local.

The main drawback to me is that an SQL database, when local, is just some big binary blog on your hard drive? Seems kind of opaque.

I'm still not sure I understand the benefits.

Is it that the WHERE commands are so intuitive in SQL? I could do a similar query very easily in dplyr.

Is it the size of the data? I could use feather in R or just work on the cluster.

Honestly that would make a current workflow I use so much better... maybe for the next project.

Or, rather, what econ data sets do I not have access to by not using databases.

I wouldn't mind this, but only as a way to motivate the use of SQL tools in econ. I've never used SQL (and it's probably hurting me on the industry market) because I've never seen a reason to. Would be nice to see a scenario where there's actually an advantage.

I set up this feed to tweet recent articles from JUE, RSUE, and JOEG. One per journal per day, from the publishers’ RSS feeds. Give it a follow if this seems useful to you! (Here’s an article that I edited at RSUE.)

Let the Cream Rise to the Top: Digital Traceability and Quality Upgrading in Kenyan Dairy Value Chain. Guest post by Guanghong Xu.

The last in our #econjmp has @guanghongxu.bsky.social (UCSC) shows how a new (Bayesian inference based) digital traceability system for milk quality in Kenya helped improve milk quality and led to farmers getting more credit from cooperatives and changing inputs blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

Winners and losers in the gig economy: What delivery platforms mean for workers. Guest post by Pascuel Plotkin Winners and losers in the gig economy: What delivery platforms mean for workers. Guest post by Pascuel Plotkin

In today's #econjmp, Pascuel Plotkin (UBC) uses matched DiD in Brazil to trace out impacts of restaurant delivery apps on workers in restaurants that use these apps, those in nearby restaurants, and on gig workers. Also how workers value flexibility of app jobs blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?

Thanks to the IGC for funding this project and thanks to the team at IGC Ghana and my survey firm DataPlas for their excellent help conducting fieldwork! See my website and JMP here: pdeffebach.github.io

I also want to do a better job quantifying the welfare losses caused by such high quit rates, maybe due to learning on the job or economies of scale. I've got some great data already for this second question, and am excited to keep working on this research agenda.

Going forward, I want to do more fieldwork to understand what makes these wage jobs so undesirable---above and beyond their low pay---and what firms and policymakers can do to make the wage sector more attractive.

Where "subsistence self-employment" is a option of last resort to help workers cope with risk in a weak wage sector, "subsistence wage-employment" is the opposite, helping workers cope with risk outside the wage sector.

I argue that low quality wage work is used as an insurance device to get through hard times in the non-wage sector. Hence the term "Subsistence wage-employment" in my title.