Weekly links July 17: African soccer migrants, the public-sector’s impacts on private hiring, rural markets from space, and more...

· With the World Cup final this weekend, the Africa Jobs Fund substack has a post entitled “82% of African players at the World Cup play overseas – is that such a bad thing?”, which discusses issues around migration and brain gain, with soccer players given as one example of a broader phenomenon. · In VoxDev, Esther Girsberger and Romuald Méango report on work in Côte d’Ivoire on graduates preferences for public and private sector work – and how non-wage amenities offered by the public sector make it costly for the private sector to attract workers. “Most associate the public sector with 'stable' and 'secure' jobs, and the private sector with 'stressful' but 'lucrative' opportunities.... improvements in job security alone can increase the perceived value of a public sector job by around one-fifth of average wages for much of the population, while the perceived value of lower working hours in the public sector corresponds to around 10% of the average wage....hiring additional workers becomes progressively more expensive, and that the public sector effectively raises labour costs economy-wide. In practical terms, the marginal worker is increasingly costly to attract because firms must compensate not only wages, but also job security, working conditions, and perceived risk.” · Also In VoxDev, Tillman von Carnap and Anna Tompsett discuss how to measure rural market activity using satellite imaging data. “Our approach relies on periodic markets looking very different on market days and non-market days... These periodic appearance changes create a unique temporal signature that allows us to detect the presence of markets even without any other information about their locations.” They also have a dashboard where you can explore these market activity measures. · And in VoxDev, Jessica Leight on which are the main funders for RCTs in published papers. “Within the 392 RCTs, virtually all (360) report a funder, and there is high dispersion (612 distinct funders). ...Certain funders are clearly influential in shaping the landscape of published RCTs, with J-PAL, the World Bank, and FCDO and its funded research networks playing a leading role; but there is also high dispersion in funding sources, suggesting limited scope for dominance by a single funder.” · One extra year is a substack in which different economists share personal stories about what pregnancy and motherhood were like for them, and what this one extra year on the CV/tenure clock meant in practice. The most recent posts are 1) from Barbara Biasi who notes “in spite of these relatively smooth rides and quick returns, it took me a long time to stop fearing that people would take me less seriously because I had chosen to have children while an assistant professor. I worried that, with every pregnancy, it would become more and more evident that I was not committed enough, not ambitious enough, not “all in” enough” and then how motherhood has changed her relationship to work “ If a paper gets rejected, I move on. If someone else is more successful than me, I care for exactly five seconds. If academia tries to convince me that every seminar, email, referee report, grant, and meeting is existential, my children are there to remind me that dinner is at 6:00. This, I think, has made me better at my job.”; and 2) from Jessica Leight who discusses two key challenges “Constraints on travel were a significant challenge, particularly as a development economist – I wasn’t, and won’t be, the parent toting her baby or toddler to a field visit in Kenya for various reasons, and that has real costs. Perhaps the most significant challenge for me has simply carving out cognitive space for larger or more ambitious plans, rather than simply humming along and keeping the machine of emails, updated drafts, and referee reports moving. Parenting crowds your brain, and as I’m now learning, it only becomes more crowded as they grow. The best benefit that any parental support policy can provide is a bit of space to un-crowd it.”