Weekly links September 18: gender inequality in India, sleep, jobs, farms, and more...

· Seema Jayachandran and Pranab Bardhan talk on gender inequality and development on Pranab’s substack: On early life health“Two things seem to be going on, and both stem from the specific form that son preference takes in India, and other cultures that practice patrilineality: the eldest son in the family is the special one. That’s why among boys, you see a drop-off in health inputs and outcomes as you go from older to younger brothers. What’s going on with girls is more subtle and it goes back to the quest for a son....”... and discussion also on low female labor force participation “Bangladesh is the “demonstration project” for India. Bringing in female-friendly jobs --- not just employers who have demand for female labor, but workplaces engineered to fit with female seclusion norms -- might, in turn, cause the norms to erode. A lot of current academic work on female employment is in that vein, for example studying work-from-home jobs for women with the conjecture that they might be a stepping stone for those women (or subsequent generations) to eventually have more freedom to work outside the home” · Johan Fourie on “Sleeponomics” – new research on how long people sleep in different countries (people sleep less in higher income countries), within a country (the rich sleep less than the poor), and an RCT that encouraged college students to sleep more and saw their grades rise as a result. · On Let’s Talk Development, Joana Silva summarizes the need for policies to foster more skills acquisition in the workplace: “employment in low- and middle-income countries is concentrated in jobs where little learning occurs.” · The Context Window with David Deming in an interview with Gina Raimondo – They discuss how to not just help overcome the barriers to hiring new entrants to the labor market, but also career switchers – and ideas for how to design tax incentives to get companies to invest more in people. · On Project Syndicate, Dani Rodrik on the Quiet Revolution in Services includes a factoid that the marginal product of labor in India is now higher in services than manufacturing. Also he argues that many of the linkages people claim occur with manufacturing occur less with modern export value chains, while the retail sector is increasingly providing these linkages. · A new VoxDevLit on agricultural policies for growth talks about why structural transformation out of agriculture is so slow, what explains why more productive farms don’t grow a lot bigger, and more... · A Noam Angrist double: o last week in Nature, he and a large team of collaborators report on results from five randomized trials in India, Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines and Uganda to evaluate the provision of education in emergency settings – based on tutoring done when schools were closed during Covid: “We test multiple scalable models of remote targeted tutoring instruction, comparing delivery by governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Whereas text messages have mixed results, tutorials conducted via phone call show effectiveness across diverse settings. We find large and robust effect sizes on learning. These effects are highly cost-effective, and deliver approximately 4 years of high-quality instruction per US$100 spent.”. o And then in a Policy Forum in Science, he and another large set of authors set out an agenda for implementation science in education. “The framework is deliberately simple and includes four phases: two in an evidence strand (efficacy trials to effectiveness trials), two in a policy and practice strand (policy plans to practice at scale), and connections between them... This includes studying how tightly controlled proofs of concept can lead to widespread, realworld evidence; how de jure policies become de facto practices on the ground; and when efficacy and effectiveness trials are taken up into policy plans or lead directly to practice at scale in the absence of formal government policy and mandates. Policies and programs might move through the framework in different ways. A more direct path might start with an efficacy trial and progress to an effectiveness trial, then to policy, and then to practice. A less linear path might first involve a program rolling out in practice, and only later being studied in an efficacy trial or informing policy, with challenges encountered in practice at scale informing policy plans or the design of efficacy and effectiveness trials. Interventions and reforms might require multiple iteration cycles through the framework before ultimately arriving at the end goal.”