William Russell Easterly

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About William Russell Easterly
William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU's Development Research Institute. He is editor of Aid Watch blog, Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics. He is the author of The White Man's Burden: How the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006), The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001), 3 co-edited books, and 61 articles in refereed economics journals. William Easterly received his Ph.D. in Economics at MIT. He was born in West Virginia and is the 8th most famous native of Bowling Green, Ohio, where he grew up. He spent sixteen years as a Research Economist at the World Bank. He is on the board of the anti-malaria philanthropy, Nets for Life. His work has been discussed in media outlets like the Lehrer Newshour, National Public Radio, the BBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Economist, the New Yorker, Forbes, Business Week, the Financial Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, and the Christian Science Monitor. Foreign Policy magazine inexplicably named him one of the world's Top 100 Public Intellectuals in 2008. His areas of expertise are the determinants of long-run economic growth, the political economy of development, and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, most heavily in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. William Easterly is an associate editor of the American Economic Journals: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Comparative Economics and the Journal of Economic Growth. He is the baseball columnist for the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.
Erratum: The above bio contains one factual mistake due to careless proofreading. He is not really the baseball columnist for L'Osservatore Romano.
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Blog postToday, after two years and four months, we end the experiment that was the Aid Watch blog.
We think the experiment was a success. We’ve had a great time blogging here. Thank you all for reading and writing back, and to our wonderful guest bloggers, for helping to make Aid Watch a source for way-outside-the-Beltway commentary on aid. Your response continues to exceed our expectations.
Some of you may be surprised. This was not a sudden decision; we have been talking it over wit11 years ago Read more -
Blog postA graphic showing striking disparities income among religions in America, from the NYT Magazine:
Bill switched from childhood Methodist to adult Episcopalian in an attempt to boost income. Did that likely work?
Barro and McCleary 2006 argue the relationship goes from income to religiosity (as measured by church attendance, personal prayer, and belief in hell and the afterlife). At least for the Protestant denominations, the ones on the left mostly feature more religiosity in t11 years ago Read more -
Blog postby Tate Watkins. Tate is a research associate at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.
Last week the World Bank issued a announced an upcoming event called Random Hacks of Kindness. Tech developers will gather at locations around the world to try to “create open solutions that can save lives and alleviate suffering.” Random Hacks of Kindness began in 2009 as a partnership between the World Bank, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and NASA. Its goal is to “produce practical open11 years ago Read more -
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Blog postEven if the serious charges against IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn are proven false, the IMF will likely be in need of a new leader.
With DSK handcuffed in the back, who will take the IMF driver's seat?
According to unwritten agreement, the IMF has always been headed by a European, just as the president of the World Bank has always been American.
Some (mainly Europeans, funnily enough) argue that the IMF needs a European leader now more than ever, because the big11 years ago Read more -
Blog postAid Watch has complained before about shaky social science analysis or shaky numbers published in medical journals, which were then featured in major news stories. We questioned creative data on stillbirths, a study on health aid, and another on maternal mortality.
Just this week, yet another medical journal article got headlines for giving us the number of women raped in the DR Congo (standard headline: a rape a minute). The study applied country-wi11 years ago Read more -
Blog postFrom a newly published article here.
Before anyone on this list gets too much of a swollen head, note that everyone after the top 4 got between 5 and 10 votes out of 299 professors surveyed (there was another group at 4 votes, including a certain J. S*chs). There also seems to be a sheer name recognition effect over-representing economists that show up in the news media, kind of the same way that Donald Trump was leading in the Republican nomination polls recently.
11 years ago Read more -
Blog postThe question:
Do more guns cause more violence?
The experiment:
We exploit a natural experiment induced by the 2004 expiration of the U.S. federal assault weapons ban to examine how the subsequent exogenous increase in gun supply affected violence in Mexico. The expiration relaxed the permissiveness of gun sales in border states such as Texas and Arizona, but not California, which retained a pre-existing state-level ban.
The results:
Using data from mor11 years ago Read more -
Blog postBy Claudia Williamson, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Development Research Institute
Rhetoric on “aid effectiveness” keeps escalating, is there anything to show for it?
The past (almost) two years, Bill and I have been collecting data, combing through that data, and refining the numbers to ‘grade’ aid agencies and assess overall trends in aid practices. We waited until our paper passed peer review to release our findings. Rhetoric versus Reality: The Best and Worst of Aid Agency Practi11 years ago Read more -
Blog postUPDATE: Wed, May 11: World Bank media chief David Theis responds (see end of comments section below)
I finally read the World Bank’s 2011 World Development Report, Conflict, Security, and Development. It shed new light on an earlier discussion I had by email with World Bank Media Chief David Theis last month, which I reproduce here, and then I add a new letter I just sent to Mr. Theis.
To World Bank Media Chief David Theis, April 7, 2011
David, I noticed that11 years ago Read more -
Blog postUPDATE: 3:30pm links to other reviews (all great) of the Fukuyama review at end of this post
F.A. Hayek continues to be the most mis-characterized economist of all time. As if Glenn Beck were not doing enough damage, now even someone I greatly respect — Frank Fukuyama– has gotten Hayek wrong yet again. In a review of a new edition of the Constitution of Liberty in the NYT book review, Fukuyama says at the end:
In the end, there is a deep contradiction11 years ago Read more