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McNamara Fellows - 2023 Cohort Blogs

When it comes to public capacity, what works, for whom, and why?

While grappling with these questions and scrolling mindlessly through Econ Twitter, I came across the Robert S. McNamara Fellowships Program, almost by accident. As I would discover in the months to come, it was a happy accident. The premise—fellows are matched to researchers in either the Development Research Group (DECRG) or the Development Impact Group (DIME) and work with them on active projects—was very engaging. Indeed, for somebody who intends to pursue a PhD in economics, such an experience is valuable because it teaches you not just what research is but also whether you like it.

My time in the fellowship was both wonderful and unique. I was initially recruited for the DE JURE program in DIME’s Governance Unit, on a project focused on determining the effect of improvements in access to justice in Kenya. However, two months into the fellowship, due to a shift in circumstances I found myself working under a different supervisor on a new project. The smoothness of this transition was a testament to both the fellowship’s robustness and DIME’s depth in quality. 

I spent the bulk of my fellowship working on the new project—an impact evaluation of a police funding program in Mexico. The program was designed to improve the capabilities of local police forces through government-sanctioned subsidies for training programs and infrastructure procurement in municipalities with the highest crime rates. Because I was onboarded early in the project’s life cycle, my work involved cleaning and analyzing administrative data to understand whether the additional funding affected future crime rates and, if so, whether there was a downstream effect on firm investment. This project was my first introduction to the economics of crime, but abundant (and rapid) feedback helped me get up to speed very quickly. 

In addition to hands-on experience, the fellowship offers many other learning opportunities. The World Bank has a rich culture of weekly seminars, regular conferences, policy discussions, and brown bag lunches. The sheer variety in both event type and topic area ensures that there is always something new to learn. These events are supplemented by workshops and mini-courses, such as Reproducible Research Fundamentals, which taught me how to write comprehensible code that is easily reproducible by external viewers and structured to handle a large team of collaborators. As a bonus, we also got to connect with active DEC researchers in weekly seminars-cum-meetings, which allowed us to draw upon their experiences in esoteric areas, ranging from machine learning to using mobile phone data to Bayesian meta-analysis, among others. 

The fellowship is an excellent learning avenue for anybody who wants to become a practitioner of applied economics. It blends exposure to academic research with the policy-centric focus of the World Bank, which makes for a nigh unique mixture that has something to offer to anybody with an interest in economics or public policy, whether in academia or elsewhere.

Headshot of Devvrat Raghav

 

Devvrat Raghav