Governance, air pollution, finance ministries and more!
This week in development economics at VoxDev: 14/08/2026
Twenty years ago, Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their pioneering work on microfinance. The idea held enormous promise: give people excluded from traditional banking access to small loans, which they could use to invest, build businesses, and improve their lives. But two decades of economic research have complicated that story. In this week’s episode of Economics Unpacked, Simon Quinn and Muhammad Meki explore the origins of microfinance, how the Grameen Bank model works, and what randomised controlled trials around the world have taught economists about its impact on poverty.
Mobile phones have become one of the most widely available technologies in low- and middle-income countries, yet their potential to improve education is still only partially understood. A new J-PAL Policy Insight reviews 30 studies of mobile phone education programmes designed to improve student learning, teacher behaviour, or parental engagement. In this week’s episode of VoxDevTalks, Jenny Aker and Noam Angrist discuss what the evidence shows about using phones to reach students, teachers, and parents – and where the approach still falls short.
Hidden plagiarism in half a million Chinese graduate dissertations reveals that academically dishonest individuals are more likely to enter and advance in the public sector, issuing more preferential, lower-quality decisions once they hold judicial power – patterns that transparency and stricter enforcement of academic integrity partially reverse. John Zhuang Liu, Wenwei Peng, and Shaoda Wang discuss.
In Kenya, Xuqian Ma, Michelle Layvant, Edward Miguel, Eric Ochieng, Ajay Pillarisetti, and Michael Walker study the link between real-time air pollution exposure and adult cognitive performance. They find that higher pollution exposure during testing is associated with lower cognitive performance; pollution spikes, not only average exposure, may matter; coarser pollution measures can miss short-run cognitive effects; and more educated respondents appear more affected.
Gundula Löffler, Andrea Sissa Velandia, and Oliver Fiala surveyed officials in finance ministries across the world to understand the rationale for their decision-making, policy preferences, and sources of influence. They find that budgets serve multiple, sometimes competing objectives; finance ministry officials show a preference for equity and social spending; poverty alleviation takes primacy over climate and gender; finance officials seek to balance the short-term and long-term in decision-making; finance ministries are not the dominant actor in resource allocation; and civil society and development partners have a lot of influence over budgets.
In India, Namrata Kala and Madeline McKelway ran a firm-level randomised controlled trial evaluating a different, but very direct form of agency: worker democracy. They focus on an important firm decision – who to reward – and benchmark worker agency against two counterfactuals, one where managers retain decision rights and another where rewards are unconnected to performance. They find that letting workers vote on rewards boosts attendance but enables collusion, while giving managers discretion boosts output but damages workplace cohesion.
Serena Cocciolo, Selene Ghisolfi, Ahasan Habib, and Anna Tompsett used a field experiment to evaluate what happens when community contribution requirements are introduced to a programme providing safe drinking water wells in rural Bangladesh. They find that requiring cash contributions for safe drinking-water wells sharply reduces take-up and impact, whereas labour contributions work about as well as no contribution at all – yet either requirement leaves the programme less cost-effective.
Analysis of over three million households across 73 countries reveals that survey data collectors systematically omit respondents who are disproportionately costly to interview, particularly under difficult working conditions. This endogenous sample selection significantly biases important official statistics and threatens the validity of research that relies on this data. Torsten Figueiredo Walter and Niclas Moneke explain.
In this week’s blog, Sharif Kazemi, Jeremy Ng, and Shahrukh Wani reflect on last month’s IGC-World Bank conference on Governing with AI.
Elsewhere in development:
PEDL currently has two funding calls open: 6th Special ERG Call for Proposals for LIC-based Researchers and 8th Special ERG Call for Proposals for PhD Students. Deadline: August 16, 2026.
Saloni Dattani writes about why every disease is a policy failure for Works in Progress.
Joel Khalili discusses the emergence of a new generation of philanthropists made rich by AI, and what we should make of their promises.