Duncan Webb

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

🔥Very cool paper showing that women in India are way more likely to take up a job (↑29%) in a female-only workplace, and that this can be explained by husbands' jealousy/desire for control. These are massive effects, equivalent to 2.5x increases in wage bit.ly/4nn9apn

Exciting news on @malengo.org, the NGO that helps East African students move to Europe for education: Our research team has given us a glimpse of their early findings! Here is the full writeup, joint with @richardnerland.bsky.social: forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CpZYHk... Thread follows!

Going to leave you with a Home Office chart from their most recent asylum stats so you can decide whether the UK is a magnet for asylum seekers with a uniquely generous asylum system www.gov.uk/government/s...

Good morning with good news: India meets 50% renewables & nuclear capacity target 5 years early! As clean capacity deploys, clean electricity production surges. Solar grew from 5 TWh in 2014 to 48 TWh in 2019 & 137 TWh in 2024. Hydro was 157 TWh; wind 82 TWh; nuclear 55 TWh in 2024. #energysky

In the last decades, the world has made fantastic progress against extreme poverty. In 1990, 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Since then, the number of extremely poor people has declined by 1.5 *billion* people. 🧵

1/ Egalitarianism should begin at home. I link to this article by @bencasselman.bsky.social in light of the communications between Larry Summers and Jeffrey Epstein that have just been released. The released emails and the fact of friendship are vile. www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/b...

Dropping a beta version of this page while everyone is up and processing baseball! This tool lets you search the full text of papers from the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal series, and over 30,000 NBER working papers. paulgp.com/econlit-pipe...

HOLY SHIT they did it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

#WarRavagedPortland

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

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

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

🌟 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

🎙️ 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

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.

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...

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

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.