Backstory: How Research Papers in Economics Get Made

Mikey speaks to Manaswini Rao, an assistant professor of economics at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware. Manaswini discusses the challenges faced by the judicial system in India, the promise of mediation address some of those challanges, and her new working paper that measures whether mediation lives up to that promise.

Read the working paper here!

Santiago speaks with Claudio Ferraz about the research behind "When Democracy Refuses to Die: Evaluating a Training Program for New Politicians", a paper on RenovaBR, one of the world’s largest training programs for aspiring politicians in Brazil. They discuss how to build a partnership with a large NGO while keeping the collaboration aligned with the incentives, standards, and timelines of academic research. Claudio also reflects on a question many researchers face: how to know when a paper is done, when an extension truly adds value, and when an idea belongs in a separate project instead. They close by discussing how to choose co-authors and why long-term collaborations can make research better and more sustainable.
The paper is co-authored with Ernesto Dal Bó, Frederico Finan, and Pedro Pessoa and is available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w33251.

In this episode, Precious interviews Andre Gray (UC San Diego) about his job-market paper, "Density and Diversity in African Cities." Andre discusses how migration size and migrant composition shape productivity, conflict, and structural transformation in rapidly urbanizing African cities. He also shares what drew him to urban and development economics and reflects on building a research agenda spanning African and U.S. settings.

Check out Andre's JMP here!

Riccardo talks to Fulvia Budillon, a PhD candidate in Economics at UC San Diego currently on the job market. Fulvia discusses the backstory of her job market paper, “Beyond Access: Facility Birth, Healthcare Use and Early-Life Mortality in Malawi.”
The conversation begins in the field, where Fulvia—through qualitative work, conversations, and failed attempts—arrives at her current research question and identification strategy. It then moves to the “middle stage” of the process: dataset construction, cleaning, and working with large administrative data. Finally, it circles back to the field, which is part of the reason Fulvia is drawn to development and health topics: behind the data she studies are real people whose health is shaped in meaningful ways by the circumstances they live in.
You can find the link to Fulvia’s paper here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yCLMf3jxV-1gEMX5C_4h2TUeKSNVw9G-/view
To learn more about our wonderful candidate, you can visit her website: https://www.fulviabudillon.com/home-page

Riccardo speaks with Ariel Zucker, Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Santa Cruz, about her paper “Price Incentives for Conservation: Experimental Evidence from Groundwater Irrigation.”
The conversation explores the logistical challenges of running a large-scale field intervention, the lessons learned from multiple pilot attempts, and the trade-offs graduate students often face when conducting fieldwork on a tight budget. It concludes with a broader reflection on what draws Ariel to her field of research and to academia more generally.
You can find the working paper (coauthored with Nick Hagerty) here: https://www.arielzucker.net/_files/ugd/2eee53_ed03d0df4bfb4e5694b95deb022c6768.pdf