Weekly links October 9: rich data on jobs for economists, new work on firms and trade, the price women pay for violent men, and more...

· Where do PhD economists land in their first job? Pablo García-Guzmán has put together a website on almost 15,000 graduates from 80 programs from 1990 through to the class of 2026: “Of the 784 graduates of the class of 2026 listed so far, 36% took tenure-track positions, 25% postdoctoral or other academic positions, and 22% private-sector jobs.” You can look by department, employer, year etc. Very useful for people wanting to get a sense of the most common outcomes and types of employers from different programs. Also very useful for people considering the private sector – you can not only see the main employers, but the names of those hired, which would allow you to see the types of profiles that have been hired. · IDEA and GAIN are holding information sessions on how to apply to graduate school programs in the U.S. (Monday 19th October) and globally (Wednesday 21 October). “Rather than reviewing basic application requirements, the panels will focus on the subtleties of how applications are actually evaluated. Topics include: What committees look for in letters, statements of purpose, grades, and GRE scores; How committees weigh research assistant, predoctoral, and master's experience; What international applicants can do to strengthen their applications and fund their studies. · On the Yale EGC, Rahul Shukla & Zeynep Bayram provide a very nice summary of papers presented at the recent firms, trade and development conference. They group this into papers around what shapes take-up of productive opportunities, work showing how policies not only affect the outcomes they are targeted at, but can work through many other adjustment margins, and work on the incidence of gains and how the interests of owners and workers may diverge. · On the CGD blog, Eeshani Kandpal summarizes work on the price women pay for men’s violence in India. “what difference does it make whether exams or admissions are perfectly fair and meritocratic when a girl cannot safely walk to college. And, it turns out, that threat alone may be enough to keep her from attending the college she earned a place at....That estimate—17 percent—isn't the cost to women who are harassed or assaulted. It's the cost of anticipating harassment and planning one's education around it....in Delhi and Bengaluru...roughly 70 percent of women who weren't students said fear of harassment mattered for whether they worked at all.” · Lant Pritchett makes an argument in In Development magazine that cuts in foreign aid globally reflect the narrowing of what aid has focused on – “in the decades since 1990, aid has instead focused on mitigating specific, direct harms to human well-being that are the result of a lack of national development. This shifted development assistance from the broad, systemic transformation of countries — what Fukuyama calls “getting to Denmark” — to projects focused on the targeted (at countries and individuals within countries) mitigation of specific harms (e.g., health/nutrition/education/access to credit/lack of skills).” There is an interesting geopolitical argument that I think has parallels with discussions over how targeted social assistance programs etc should be - by focusing on the poorest, most struggling countries, soft power impacts of aid are weakened since these countries are not the ones where donor countries have the strongest foreign policy interests. Likewise, narrowly targeted benefits programs may have less political support than those with broader eligibility. · On Yale’s SOM website, Mushfiq Mobarak summarizes his work in Nepal on how small loans to families of migrant workers helped them smooth incomes during the lean season. “Because technology to remit wages electronically across the border did not exist, most workers only brought money back home when they returned for the harvest season. Money wasn’t arriving during the lean season, when it would carry the most value for families’ food and financial security...in the absence of technological solutions, a well-timed loan structured to match the cadence of migrants’ work travel could address this remittance friction...among families that received the loan, investment in nitrogen fertilizer increased by 17% and weekly labor on household farms increased by 3.4-3.6 hours. Those investments during the lean season—impossible for families that lack funds or physical capacity to work their land—resulted in a 12% increase in rice harvested” · On the Econ that Matters blog, Alix Nauger looks at how firms adjusted when Vietnam made non-compliance with labor laws more costly, in a situation where these laws apply at a threshold of 10 or more paid workers. Firms increased their use of unpaid labor such as family workers, and partially rather than fully formalized.