Inaugural edition of the SALDRU December Workshop
Image supplied by Rocco Zizzamia.
Last month SALDRU hosted the inaugural edition of the SALDRU December Workshop, which, as the name suggests, we hope will become a regular meeting. The aim of the workshop is to encourage overseas-based researchers to present frontier Economics research in South Africa, as well as provide a venue for local researchers to engage with and present this kind of work. By taking advantage of Cape Town’s December delights, the hope is to attract researchers from around the world, and engage in a small but intensive and vibrant setting.
This first iteration of the workshop was a happy success, with approximately 50 people attending 12 presentations across 2 days, and a robust stream of questions and plenty of lively conversations in-between. Presenters came from seven different institutions, while the audience was a mix of established and early-career academics, policymakers, and a notable cohort of local PhD students.
The explicit criteria for submissions was work expected to be published in top international Economics journals, and other highly innovative research. This style of work was perhaps best illustrated by the brilliant keynote address delivered by Dennis Egger of the University of Oxford. Egger presented his new research positing an innovative microfoundation for one of the original questions in the Development field, that of slack in a classic Lewis model. More than an engrossing question, the method of analysis combined a structural model with the results of a wide-ranging randomized control trial (RCT), demonstrating some of the exciting methodological possibilities at the research frontier.
Indeed, the workshop featured a variety of methodological approaches: RCTs (Ashley Pople and Rocco Zizzamia), a meta-analysis of such RCTs (Kreft), quasi-experimental IV and difference-in-difference designs (Martin Mwale and Joshua Budlender), experiments (Kai Barron), structural estimation (Amy Thornton), and machine-learning methods (Emily Aiken and Simon Halliday). One of the most exciting aspects of economics research today is this playground of modern tools, and exposure to these tools is one of the main aims of the workshop.
Beyond frontier methods, the workshop focused on themes of development. Ten of the twelve presentations studied developing country contexts, with nearly all of the authors having grown up in such settings (mostly South Africans visiting home for the holidays – attracting these researchers is another aim of the workshop timing!). The topics included questions around the delivery of cash grants (Aiken, Zizzamia and Pople), gendered land rights, and labour supply (Mwale and Thornton).
We also wanted to carve out time for PhD students at the workshop, and Gameli Adika and Richard Freund presented some of their PhD research to an engaged audience who had a variety of helpful suggestions as to how they may want to take their research forward. Claire Hofmeyr provided information on how researchers might work with J-PAL Africa. Audience participation was excellent, with a variety of questions and constructive suggestions being posed throughout the workshop. Outside of the seminar room, there was plenty of time in-between sessions and over meals for productive and leisurely conversations, and for people to get to know each other.
This inaugural version of the workshop was only conceptualised and organised in the latter half of 2024, and so was somewhat ad-hoc. Going forward as a regular annual event, its organisation will be more extensive, including a call for papers going out much earlier, a proper paper selection panel and organising team, and perhaps some funding to make the workshop more accessible. We welcome suggestions for these future workshops, especially if it includes an interest in helping to organise it.
Especially given how quickly the workshop came together we owe a huge thank you to all involved, especially our director Reza Daniels for being extremely supportive and making it possible, the administrative team and especially Amy Jephthah for taking on much of the unreasonably last-minute organising, and the presenters and audience for attending and engaging so fully and vibrantly.
List of presenters and topics:
This first iteration of the workshop was a happy success, with approximately 50 people attending 12 presentations across 2 days, and a robust stream of questions and plenty of lively conversations in-between. Presenters came from seven different institutions, while the audience was a mix of established and early-career academics, policymakers, and a notable cohort of local PhD students.
The explicit criteria for submissions was work expected to be published in top international Economics journals, and other highly innovative research. This style of work was perhaps best illustrated by the brilliant keynote address delivered by Dennis Egger of the University of Oxford. Egger presented his new research positing an innovative microfoundation for one of the original questions in the Development field, that of slack in a classic Lewis model. More than an engrossing question, the method of analysis combined a structural model with the results of a wide-ranging randomized control trial (RCT), demonstrating some of the exciting methodological possibilities at the research frontier.
Indeed, the workshop featured a variety of methodological approaches: RCTs (Ashley Pople and Rocco Zizzamia), a meta-analysis of such RCTs (Kreft), quasi-experimental IV and difference-in-difference designs (Martin Mwale and Joshua Budlender), experiments (Kai Barron), structural estimation (Amy Thornton), and machine-learning methods (Emily Aiken and Simon Halliday). One of the most exciting aspects of economics research today is this playground of modern tools, and exposure to these tools is one of the main aims of the workshop.
Beyond frontier methods, the workshop focused on themes of development. Ten of the twelve presentations studied developing country contexts, with nearly all of the authors having grown up in such settings (mostly South Africans visiting home for the holidays – attracting these researchers is another aim of the workshop timing!). The topics included questions around the delivery of cash grants (Aiken, Zizzamia and Pople), gendered land rights, and labour supply (Mwale and Thornton).
We also wanted to carve out time for PhD students at the workshop, and Gameli Adika and Richard Freund presented some of their PhD research to an engaged audience who had a variety of helpful suggestions as to how they may want to take their research forward. Claire Hofmeyr provided information on how researchers might work with J-PAL Africa. Audience participation was excellent, with a variety of questions and constructive suggestions being posed throughout the workshop. Outside of the seminar room, there was plenty of time in-between sessions and over meals for productive and leisurely conversations, and for people to get to know each other.
This inaugural version of the workshop was only conceptualised and organised in the latter half of 2024, and so was somewhat ad-hoc. Going forward as a regular annual event, its organisation will be more extensive, including a call for papers going out much earlier, a proper paper selection panel and organising team, and perhaps some funding to make the workshop more accessible. We welcome suggestions for these future workshops, especially if it includes an interest in helping to organise it.
Especially given how quickly the workshop came together we owe a huge thank you to all involved, especially our director Reza Daniels for being extremely supportive and making it possible, the administrative team and especially Amy Jephthah for taking on much of the unreasonably last-minute organising, and the presenters and audience for attending and engaging so fully and vibrantly.
List of presenters and topics:
- Keynote, Dennis Egger, University of Oxford: Slack and Economic Development
- Emily Aiken, Carnegie Mellon University Africa: Moving Targets: Can Machine Learning Help Proxy Means Tests Better Account for Poverty Dynamics?
- Kai Barron, WZB Berlin: Narrative Persuasion
- Joshua Budlender, University of Cape Town: Rent-sharing, monopsony and minimum wages
- Simon Halliday, Johns Hopkins University: What do we think an economist should know? A machine learning investigation of research and intermediate-level textbooks
- Brynde Kreft, University of Oxford: Information, skills and job search: A Bayesian hierarchical analysis of the impacts of reducing information frictions for unskilled jobseekers in developing countries
- Ashley Pople, World Bank: The earlier the better? Cash transfers for drought response in Niger
- Amy Thornton, University of Cape Town: Own- and cross-price elasticities of married women’s labour supply in South Africa
- Martin Mwale, University of Stellenbosch: What’s hers isn’t mine: Gender-differentiated tenure security, agricultural investments and productivity in sub-Saharan Africa
- Rocco Zizzamia, University of Oxford: Household adaptation to flood shocks
- PhD student panel: Gameli Adika (UCT) and Richard Freund (UCT)