Development Economics

Michael Kremer will be the new Chief Economist of the World Bank. This is one of the most influential positions in an institution that committed $118 billion to development last year. Probably the largest impact you could ever have? Not if your name is Michael Kremer. The Bank’s own announcement says his work has “reached hundreds of millions of people”. Below are the public counts of people reached, and the measured impacts, of four initiatives he had a hand in. These numbers are hard to pin down, so the critiques and the revised estimates are collected at the bottom. ...

This year’s Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) 2026 Conference at the University of Oxford brought together ~200 papers spanning agriculture, health, gender, climate, finance, and more, covering research in 33 African countries. Here is a roundup of what was presented, with one-line summaries and links to the papers. The Big Picture African representation What I love about CSAE is the African representation. I don’t know another economics conference where you can chat with people from across the continent over a single lunch. To measure this, I tried two approaches. First, I used AI to identify each speaker’s country of residence based on their primary affiliation. For global organizations like the World Bank, I assumed headquarters. By this measure, only about a quarter of speakers reside in Africa — though they come from 16 different African countries. The majority still come from the UK, Europe, and the US. ...