Duncan Webb

From @economist.com

Very excited to be starting as a faculty member at NovaSBE, along with 9 other lovely members of the crew! Looking forward to meeting all my fantastic colleagues in Lisbon

The Limits of Data Policymakers want to make decisions based on clear data, but important factors are lost when we rely solely on data. A philosopher writes:

Reminds me of this - "The Limits of Data"
issues.org/limits-of-da...

GDP: We Really Don’t Know How Good We Have It—Asterisk Everyone loves the hockey stick graph of long-run economic growth. For some, it's the basis of an entire worldview. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t add up.

Fantastic article by Oliver Kim about how to think about GDP measures across long stretches of history (it's hard!)

asteriskmag.com/issues/11/gd...

On one hand, reducing car use reduces urban pollution.
But on the other, everyone likes it and cities become more livable

A 4-year limit on student visa length would upend PhD programs.

A conversation with RPDE Postdoctoral Research Associate Miguel Ortiz: Understanding the economics of conflict, producing a radio drama, and more Note: This interview is the second in our series interviewing RPDE’s visitors. See the first with Eric Verhoogen here. Check back for our third with Jessica Goldberg soon.Before we welcome in an excit...

rpde.princeton.edu/news/2025/co...

Policy Associate - Scaling a Menstrual Hygiene & Stigma Intervention, J-PAL Africa | The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

🌟 Opportunity: Policy Associate for an incredible project in Madagascar 🇲🇬

Our team is hiring a policy associate to support the Ministry of Education in scaling Kilonga - an evidence-based program that improves learning and combats menstrual stigma, reaching 712,000 students.

tinyurl.com/madapolicy

We're hiring for a short-term (mid-Sept to mid-Dec) role as a field RA on an RCT about rural healthcare in northern Uganda. Must have fieldwork experience and ideally experience in Uganda/East Africa. Please share with anyone who might be interested.

🎙️ In a recent @voxdev.bsky.social talk, NOVAFRICA Scientific Director @catiabatista.bsky.social & Caroline Theoharides discuss key findings from their @science.org paper:

“Brain Drain or Brain Gain? The Impact of High-Skilled Migration on Origin Countries.”

🔗 voxdev.org/topic/migrat...

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

Since 2000, Gavi has helped get vaccines to 1.1 billion children. The U.S. announced that, after this year, it’s pulling out all its money. If that happens, Gavi estimates that 75 million children will miss vaccinations over the next five years—and of those, 1.2 million children will die.​

According to a UNAIDS analysis, ending PEPFAR-supported programs for people living with HIV could result in an additional 4.2 million deaths by 2029: b-gat.es/4lbD4Lw

Effective health aid: Evidence from Gavi’s vaccine programme Coordinated health aid for vaccination has increased coverage rates and saved the lives of children around the world.

USAID has spent $2 billion supporting vaccines through GAVI. In research, published in AEJ:Economic Policy, Kartini Shastry and I find GAVI saved 1.5 million lives at a low cost of $9,000 per child saved. See the writeup of our research in VoxDev:
voxdev.org/topic/health...

The global vaccine campaign GAVI saved 1.5 million lives so far, as economists @dantortorice.bsky.social and Kartini Shastry have shown.

Now the US Administration, captured by anti-vaccine zealots, will cancel *all* funding for GAVI.

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/h...

An act of mass death.

RFK Jr. says US won’t donate to global vaccine effort Kennedy ripped into Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in a video address at its pledging summit.

This is a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of @gavi.org. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1B children, & averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year - and RFK Jr will be personally responsible.
www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

The CBO has analyzed the distributional impacts of H.R. 1, a.k.a. the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Household resources for the bottom income decile would fall by 4% ($1,600), largely due to Medicaid & SNAP cuts.

The top income decile will see increases of 2.3% ($12,000), largely due to tax cuts.

At Princeton today to celebrate the career of the brilliant and generous Janet Currie, a pioneer in the economics of children.

I and the many researchers in this audience wouldn't be where we are if not for her mentorship.

This post estimates that proposed USAID cuts will cost almost a million lives
www.cgdev.org/blog/millio...

Work with me and my star coauthors (Patrick Agte & Pascaline Dupas) on AI & health! We're recruiting a full-time, Hindi-speaking field research associate to work on our project in Rajasthan. Please share and apply.

jpalsouth.asia/jobsPage?ID=...

#econtwitter #econsky #econra

Nature ran a piece finding that 25 million people could die as a result of ending USAID. This puts Trump and Musk in the category of the most brutal leaders of the 20th century in terms of unnecessary lives lost.
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The image shows a line graph comparing Poland's GDP per capita to the average GDP per capita of the European Union (EU 27) from 2000 to 2023. The vertical axis ranges from $0 to $60,000, while the horizontal axis represents the years, marked from 2000 to 2023. A red line represents Poland's GDP per capita, starting at around $21,200 in 2004, the year Poland joined the EU, and increasing to approximately $44,400 by 2023. A blue line depicts the EU average GDP per capita, which trends higher than Poland's throughout the graph. A note emphasizes that between 2004 and 2023, Poland's GDP per capita more than doubled, reducing the gap with the EU average. The source of the data is the World Bank, projected for 2025, and the data is expressed in international dollars adjusted to 2021 prices.

Poland’s GDP per capita has more than doubled since it joined the European Union in 2004

On the economic costs of ending DEI In January 2025, Donald Trump signed executive orders 14151 and 14173, which were intended to eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities in the federal bureaucracy and nondiscrimi...

Short, timely, important, and informative piece by Rohini Pande on the economic costs of ending DEI.

www.science.org/doi/full/10....

The obliteration of this survey is a terrible loss to social science.

🧵 (1/6) ‪Tax Policy Center, @budgetlab.bsky.social‬@taxpolicycenter, and PennWharton all have new analyses of the House bill; they paint a remarkable picture of a starkly regressive bill. Cuts to Medicaid/SNAP exacerbate the regressive pattern of the tax increases, making quite a picture.

Predoc Job Description Pre-Doctoral Research Assistant (Development Economics)Institution: Nova SBE, Lisbon (In-Person, with Partial Remote Flexibility)Supervisor: Duncan Webb, Assistant Professor of Economics Position O...

Come and work with me in lovely Lisbon! I’m hiring a full-time predoc research associate to work on exciting projects on discrimination, AI and health, and social media use in LMICs. Please share and apply!

#econra #econtwitter #econsky

tinyurl.com/novapredoc

All the evidence is that Gemini 2.5 Pro represents a new level of LLM that is much more capable than any released model, including other big reasoners. It got 24.4% on the Math Olympiad test that every other model bombed last week, for example.

I am very curious to see the system card. matharena.ai

Each dot represents 10 people whose lives depend on US foreign aid, just for HIV prevention & treatment.

Without it, 1.6m people could die *per year*.

Is It Fascism? What the leading book on the subject suggests about Trump and his movement

Is it fascism?

dgardner.substack.com/p/is-it-fasc...