Lead Economist at the World Bank’s Development Research Group
Development Impact blogger
https://sites.google.com/site/decrgdmckenzie/
David McKenzie
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This year's series also reports on review times, and on how journal editors are seeing the use of AI in their journals so far. 2025 is too early to see fully AI-generated papers, but publishers are starting to introduce AI disclosure policies.
Hope this is useful for people again.
This week's links include another example of why S.D.s are terrible units for comparing effect sizes, a discussion on Rwanda's development story, how to aggregate noisy evidence, do you think interventions are complements? and more... blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
Nice blog post today by @sanukriti.bsky.social on the different types of gender norms and interventions for changing them blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?
This week's links include women's labor force participation is up in Turkey, but still very limited in Pakistan; Planet Money covers Brazil's Zona Franca in Manaus; how to think about research transparency in the AI era, and more...
blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
Some journals have at least increased the number they publish as submissions increase, with over 1,000 papers published in these 14 journals in 2025. So there is a lot of new development research. Acceptance rates are in the 6-8% range at many journals
What happens when we take an elegant theory model too literally, are cows really the answer to poverty, the dangers of heterogeneity w.r.t. a baseline X, and more - I discuss the new @deankarlan.bsky.social & co-authors revisiting of a seminal poverty trap paper blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
Today I have put up my 10th annual look at development journals, which works with journal editors to put together statistics on submission numbers, acceptance rates, review times, and more. This is the post that takes me the most time to do each year
blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
Submission numbers grew rapidly in the last year at several development journals. World Development got 1276 more submissions than in 2024, reaching over 5,000; and JDE got 830 new submissions, reaching over 3,000. Both exceed the AER's 2,114 submissions.
As a nice follow-up on Monday's post on development journals, today we have a guest post by @leightjessica.bsky.social on what development papers top journals publish: what share are RCTs? What topics are covered most? Which countries? Read on: blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
This week's links include several thoughts on the jobs challenge (public works? services? entrepreneurship?), whether agency interventions are that impressive for poverty, and more... blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
