Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

(Research team in Sierra Leone, photo credit: Jeff Steinberg)

Please support the poverty researchers who really work amazingly hard (I can promise you HQ is not spending it on reliable copiers). Poverty-action.org/donate.

• Some nice news this week, the MacArthur Foundation awarded its big “100&Change” 100 million dollar big idea award to the International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop. They’ll use it to implement an evidence-based “toxic stress” reduction and education program for Syrian refugee children in four countries.
• A Nobel Prize winning biologist created a fund to help women scientists hire assistance for domestic work that disproportionately falls on women, like childcare and cleaning.
• The Development Impact bloggers pick their favorite papers of the year and offer short summaries.
• Tavneet Suri’s reflections on a great first six months for Vox Dev (wow, has it been only 6 mo?!) and some of her favorite reading.
• For anybody who wants a quick Dev Econ 101, Jess Hoel had her students tweetstorm some classic papers. Follow the links in this thread:

I held a Final Exam by Twitter! How did the students do? A thread of threads…

— Jess Hoel (@Jess_Hoel) December 20, 2017

• Her reflections on how it went here. She thinks the skills it takes to put a paper into tweets – thinking about the audience and presenting the core of an idea briefly and visually – are very generalizable.
• Job: IPA’s hiring a qualified senior research associate in Mexico to study good policing practices (Dec 31 deadline!)
• Students of color, particularly African-Americans, make up a lower share of Econ Ph.D. students and faculty than other disciplines. Peter Blair Henry, dean of NYU school of business offers a fellowship for promising minority undergraduates to spend two years in New York doing research and being mentored in preparation for applying to Ph.D. programs. (Deadline Feb 16th.)
• Interview advice for econ job candidates:
  • Advice for the Running of The Economists, the exhausting/terrifying job interview process from people who’ve been there and survived (selection biased), along with interview prep and other advice.
  • More interview tips from David Laibson, and advice from Jesse Shapiro on how to structure a talk. (Both via Dina Pomeranz)
  • For those unfamiliar with the process of Econ job interviews, listen to this fun Planet Money podcast episode about it.
• And if you’re going on a trip, remember our IPA 2017 Great Holiday Travel Podcast Playlist (and leave your additions there in the comments)