Weekly links December 19: Savings, basic incomes, skill gaps & M&Ms, and more…

• On the FAI blog Tim Ogden discusses what we mean by savings when we talk about it as an outcome.
• A snapshot of the job market this year from 538 – what the next generation of economists is working on? Development is pretty popular, corporate finance and international economics not so much.
• Testing basic incomes: the Guardian reports on an experiment in India, where Unicef funded an unconditional basic income scheme. A “modified randomized control trial” (whatever that is) assigned everyone in 8 treatment villages to receive a monthly income for 18 months, with 12 control villages: “the basic incomes resulted in more economic activity and work. Conventional labour statistics would have picked that up inadequately. There was a big increase in secondary economic activities, as well as a shift from casual wage labour to own-account farming and small-scale business” Haven’t come across an academic paper with the results or more details.

• A new (long) NBER working paper by Heckman and others reviews the recent literature on measuring and boosting cognitive and noncognitive skills. Some things I found of interest:
  • Just how important incentivizing answers can be: “Test scores for young children can be improved by one standard deviation by offering candy for correct answers.” “The black-white gap in IQ can be completely eliminated by giving M&M candies for correct answers”
  • Measuring non-cognitive skills through surveys vs measured behaviors: “literature suggests that there are objective measurements of non-cognitive skills that are not plagued by reference bias.” – but the examples given like school absences, participation in extra-curriculars, etc. don’t strike me as overly compelling.
  • “Of the Big Five, Conscientiousness (the tendency to be organized, responsible, and hardworking) is the most widely predictive across a variety of outcomes…Conscientiousness predicts years of schooling with the same strength as measures of intelligence”.
  • The length of time needed to measure effects: “The three-year follow-up is too short to determine whether the program has lasting effects” and “Given the concern that apprenticeships train workers too narrowly and make apprentices less adaptable to a changing labor market, in evaluating apprenticeship programs it is important to follow those completing apprenticeships over long time horizons.”
• Call for papers: 8^th International Conference on Migration and Development – to be held at the World Bank this year, June 8-9.
• Research funding: PEDL has just launched a new call for major grants on private sector development in low-income countries.

 
Development Impact will be on break for the next two weeks. Happy holidays to all our readers, and see you next year.