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Peter Deffebach

@macrodev.bsky.social
56 followers 129 following 40 posts

Development / Urban / Macro economist at BU. On the 24-25 Job Market pdeffebach.github.io

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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
David McKenzie @dmckenzie.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
Today's JMP features @akhila-kovvuri.bsky.social's work which shows how the extension of the metro system in Delhi generated new jobs around transit stations. Using staggered DiD, she shows consumer-focused firms move in, with new jobs. Large gain for women. blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?
blogs.worldbank.org
What if the train brought the job to you? How public transit moves opportunity closer—and changes who gets hired: Guest post by Akhila Kovvuri
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
VoxDev @voxdev.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
What have we learned about training entrepreneurs? Issue 4 of our VoxDevLit on Training Entrepreneurs by @dmckenzie.bsky.social, Christopher Woodruff & Co-Editors is out now!➡️ voxdev.org/voxdevlit/tr... Today's podcast covers the update➡️ voxdev.org/topic/firms/...
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
The Quarterly Journal of Economics @qjeharvard.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
#QJE Nov 2025, #1, “The Economics of Spatial Mobility: Theory and Evidence Using Smartphone Data,” by Miyauchi, Nakajima, and Redding (@reddingecon.bsky.social): doi.org/10.1093/qje/...
doi.org
The Economics of Spatial Mobility: Theory and Evidence Using Smartphone Data*
ABSTRACT. We develop a tractable quantitative framework for modeling the rich patterns of spatial mobility observed in smartphone data. We show that travel
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
David McKenzie @dmckenzie.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
This week was short on links that caught my attention, but here they are: blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
blogs.worldbank.org
Weekly links June 27: low-income labor markets, ERPs for SMEs, take time to think.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
True, but on the other hand I like to be able to ctrl-f for the exact number written in the text in order to find a table.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
this paper is nice www.nber.org/papers/w32124 > we propose a methodology that only reports decimal digits in a parameter estimate that reject a hypothesis of statistical equivalence.
nber.org
Credible Numbers: A Procedure for Reporting Statistical Precision in Parameter Estimates
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
AEA Journals @aeajournals.bsky.social · 13/03/2025
Forthcoming in AER: Insights: "Long-Term and Lasting Impacts of Personal Initiative Training on Entrepreneurial Success" by Francisco Campos, Michael Frese, Leonardo Iacovone, Hillary C. Johnson, David McKenzie, and Mona Mensmann. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...
aeaweb.org
Long-Term and Lasting Impacts of Personal Initiative Training on Entrepreneurial Success
(Forthcoming Article) - A randomized experiment in Togo found that personal initiative training for small businesses resulted in large and significant impacts for both men and women after two years. W...
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
David McKenzie @dmckenzie.bsky.social · 27/01/2025
In today's blog, @berkozler12.bsky.social summarizes new work by @marcellaalsan.bsky.social & co-authors on how mean reversion may lower average impacts in RCTs - lots of people being treated may be in a temporary dip that will improve on its own blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
blogs.worldbank.org
Mean Reversion in RCTs: It may matter for targeting…
Mean Reversion in RCTs: It may matter for targeting…
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
iain @maccoinnich.bsky.social · 06/01/2025
This is a crushing blow to the future of Oregon's economy. This is the kind of thing where having the second most senior Democrat in the US Senate should really help, but it seems not to have. www.oregonlive.com/silicon-fore...
oregonlive.com
Arizona wins last of 3 planned federal chip research sites, a setback for Oregon and Intel
The decision leaves out Oregon, whose leaders hoped a federal research center would anchor a new generation of semiconductor activity in the state.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 02/01/2025
This means that for other procedural things, like how voting is done, how bills get sent to the floor, etc, the mayor can weigh in and break ties?
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
Diego Puga @diegopuga.org · 27/12/2024
h) Miyauchi, @ecmaeditors.bsky.social. Using Japanese firm‐to‐firm transactions panel data, shows rematching following unexpected supplier bankruptcy improves with spatial density of alternative suppliers; this can account for big share of agglomeration benefits t.ly/0TTgV
t.ly
Matching and Agglomeration: Theory and Evidence from Japanese Firm-to-Firm Trade - The Econometric Society
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 02/01/2025
Thanks! Hope they can come to an agreement. I've been worried there will be lots of tenuous procedural disputes in the opening months
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 02/01/2025
Wait, so Portland created a 12 person council, but the charter didn't explicitly outline how to deal with ties?
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
Alessandro Martinello 🇪🇺 @alemartinello.com · 22/12/2024
Thanks to a good question by @macrodev.bsky.social and inspired by @paulgp.com, I wrote down my Christmas wish for #econsky / #dkøko economists: Learn SQL and teach it to your students 🙏 It will tremendously help your data work and destress your machines. @duckdb.org makes it easy to get started.
alemartinello.com
Teach SQL in (grad) school
Why SQL ought really to be a staple in the toolbox of anyone working with data - in or outside academia.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Yes that is a good example. Hard to do these specialized joins outside of SQL. Ultimately, I'm not sure what I want, tbh. I kind of *want* a big binary blob of files that's managed exclusively by a database, but I also want to be able to inspect particular parquet files. It's a trade-off.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
So aside from data integrity things (ensuring a structure, matches work seamlessly), it's not obvious how a SQL workflow is good when data is local.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
The main problem I have is that our workflow is having a big Dropbox folder holding the data, and a separate git repo with all the code. That is, the data is local. The main drawback to me is that an SQL database, when local, is just some big binary blog on your hard drive? Seems kind of opaque.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
I'm still not sure I understand the benefits. Is it that the WHERE commands are so intuitive in SQL? I could do a similar query very easily in dplyr. Is it the size of the data? I could use feather in R or just work on the cluster.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 20/12/2024
Honestly that would make a current workflow I use so much better... maybe for the next project.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
Or, rather, what econ data sets do I not have access to by not using databases.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
I wouldn't mind this, but only as a way to motivate the use of SQL tools in econ. I've never used SQL (and it's probably hurting me on the industry market) because I've never seen a reason to. Would be nice to see a scenario where there's actually an advantage.
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
Jeffrey Lin @jeffrlin.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
I set up this feed to tweet recent articles from JUE, RSUE, and JOEG. One per journal per day, from the publishers’ RSS feeds. Give it a follow if this seems useful to you! (Here’s an article that I edited at RSUE.)
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
David McKenzie @dmckenzie.bsky.social · 16/12/2024
The last in our #econjmp has @guanghongxu.bsky.social (UCSC) shows how a new (Bayesian inference based) digital traceability system for milk quality in Kenya helped improve milk quality and led to farmers getting more credit from cooperatives and changing inputs blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...
blogs.worldbank.org
Let the Cream Rise to the Top: Digital Traceability and Quality Upgrading in Kenyan Dairy Value Chain. Guest post by Guanghong Xu.
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
David McKenzie @dmckenzie.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
In today's #econjmp, Pascuel Plotkin (UBC) uses matched DiD in Brazil to trace out impacts of restaurant delivery apps on workers in restaurants that use these apps, those in nearby restaurants, and on gig workers. Also how workers value flexibility of app jobs blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?
blogs.worldbank.org
Winners and losers in the gig economy: What delivery platforms mean for workers. Guest post by Pascuel Plotkin
Winners and losers in the gig economy: What delivery platforms mean for workers. Guest post by Pascuel Plotkin
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Thanks to the IGC for funding this project and thanks to the team at IGC Ghana and my survey firm DataPlas for their excellent help conducting fieldwork! See my website and JMP here: pdeffebach.github.io
pdeffebach.github.io
Peter Deffebach's Website
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
I also want to do a better job quantifying the welfare losses caused by such high quit rates, maybe due to learning on the job or economies of scale. I've got some great data already for this second question, and am excited to keep working on this research agenda.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Going forward, I want to do more fieldwork to understand what makes these wage jobs so undesirable---above and beyond their low pay---and what firms and policymakers can do to make the wage sector more attractive.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Where "subsistence self-employment" is a option of last resort to help workers cope with risk in a weak wage sector, "subsistence wage-employment" is the opposite, helping workers cope with risk outside the wage sector.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
I argue that low quality wage work is used as an insurance device to get through hard times in the non-wage sector. Hence the term "Subsistence wage-employment" in my title.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
(barring, for example, really low amenity work, like Blattman and Dercon's paper on factories in Ethiopia). My workers are quitting all sorts of jobs, even office jobs. So wage work is not as nice as previously thought and its not just due to really bad physical characteristics of the workplace.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Okay, stepping back, I want to tell you why I think my JMP is neat. I think the "conventional wisdom" of development economists is that wage jobs are desirable relative to the non-wage sector
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
I find differences in the volatility of non-wage income accounts for about a quarter of the difference in exit rates between the two countries.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
This story is plausible, but I want to know how important this mechanism, volatility in non-wage income, really is in driving high exit rates in Ghana. To do that I build a model of job search and calibrate it to match both the USA and Ghana.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
A personal business fails or transfer income from friends and family falls through, then a worker takes up a wage job for a few months until they get their affairs in order. Once they have re-gained their income earning ability outside of wage work, they quit.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
I argue quits are so high because wage jobs are frequently only taken up as a temporary option of last resort as workers cope with risk outside the wage sector.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Contrary to conventional wisdom, I find exits are due to quits, and not layoffs. Workers are voluntarily choosing to leave the wage sector.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
I when to Accra, Ghana, and ran a panel survey of workers and a separate survey of formal firms to understand why workers leave the wage sector at such high rates.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
But we don't know why poor countries have such high exit rates. Are forces on the firm-side, say, highly volatile demand in poor countries, leading to lots of layoffs? Or are forces on the worker-side, say poor working conditions, driving lots of quits?
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Recent work by Kevin Donavan, Will Lu, and Todd Schoellman in the QJE, shows that high exit rates *out* of wage work, rather than low entry rates *into* wage work drive low wage employment rates in poor countries.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
I'm happy to see my JMP written up in the Development Impact Blog! Let me give a small overview of my paper and why I think it's exciting / important / why you should hire me.
pdeffebach.github.io
Peter Deffebach's Website
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Kevin Donovan, Will Lu, and Todd Schoellman should host a mini-conference that's just Job Market Candidates whose JMPs are inspired directly by Donovan, Lu, and Schoellman (2023, QJE)
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
renv has a lot of problems with geo-spatial packages, i.e. `sf`. We had to stop using it because it wouldnt keep track of non-CRAN packages very well. Have you experienced this at all?
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
One of my research agendas if I get an academic or WB job is to just hang out at a construction site in a developing country and keep track of these kinds of things to understand what hidden costs affect the construction sector in these places I could do that in NYC, too, but I'm a dev economist.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 06/11/2024
Is it a "they took our jobs" complaint? Or something more about them just not liking venezuelans / other immigrant groups.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 30/10/2024
There's *a lot* of room for empirical work on the role of the population boom in the east asian growth story. Most work is from the 1980s. And every paper on labor on Africa starts with "African labor markets must accommodate an influx of new workers..." Do we really think this is the problem?
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Reposted by Peter Deffebach
Florian Oswald @floswald.bsky.social · 23/10/2024
Status: conditionally accepted at REStud #econsky floswald.github.io/publication/...
floswald.github.io
Structural Change, Landuse and Urban Expansion | Florian Oswald
How do cities grow in the process of structural transformation? To answer this question, we develop a multi-sector spatial equilibrium model with endogenous land use: land is used either for agricultu...
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/10/2024
I do! I mean when entering it into Jabref etc.
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 22/10/2024
The all caps, rather than small caps, paper title makes it annoying to copy and paste the title when adding it to a bibliography. B+
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Peter Deffebach @macrodev.bsky.social · 20/10/2024
BC and BU have a twice annual macro conference called the Green Line Macro Meeting (GLMM)
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