Robin Burgess is Co-Director of newly launched International Growth Centre (IGC)

International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander MP today launched the new International Growth Centre (IGC), to be led by the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics (LSE), to provide practical help to promote economic growth in developing countries. The Executive Director of the Centre will be Gobind Nankani while Professor Paul Collier of the University of Oxford and Professor Robin Burgess of the LSE will be Co-Directors. Other distinguished names associated with IGC are Lord Sir Nicholas Stern and Professor Tim Besley of LSE, Professor Stefan Dercon of Oxford, Nobel Laureate Mike Spence of Stanford and Professor Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard.

The Centre will be funded by the Department for International Development (DFID), which will provide £37million over the next three years. At the launch at the LSE on 10 December, Mr Alexander described the Centre as a ‘global brains trust’, which could improve the ability of developing countries to cope with effects of the economic downturn and provide innovative research on growth.

As well as commissioning and conducting research, the Oxford-LSE hub will seek to create a global network of experts by forging partnerships with individuals, networks and institutions from all over the world. The IGC, together with its partners, will be a unique resource providing a ‘hotline’ to the advice from world experts for developing countries that need practical support on issues, such as finance, agricultural yields, the energy sector or policies for the economy as a whole.

Research Award Granted: Gerard Padro

Gerard Padro has been awarded an ESRC First Grant in June 2008 with effect from October 2008 for the research project Strategic Risk, Civil War and Intervention: A Dynamic Global Games Approach.

Research Award Granted: Henrik Kleven

Henrik Kleven has been awarded an ESRC Grant for November 2008 - November 2010 for the research project entitled “An Experimental Evaluation of Tax Evasion and Tax Enforcement in Denmark”

Oriana Bandiera awarded Research Grant

Oriana Bandiera has been awarded the British Academy Research Development Award for September 2008‐June 2010

Tim Besley (joint with Neil Meads and Paulo Surico) ''Insiders versus Outsiders in Monetary Policymaking'' forthcoming AER (Papers and Proceedings)

A paper by Timothy Besley (joint with Neil Meads and Paulo Surico) “Insiders versus Outsiders in Monetary Policymaking” is forthcoming in American Economic Review(Papers and Proceedings)

Oriana Bandiera (joint with Iwan Barankay and Imran Rasul) ''Social Connections and Incentives in the Workplace: Evidence from Personnel Data''

A paper by Oriana Bandiera (joint with Iwan Barankay and Imran Rasul) “Social Connections and Incentives in the Workplace: Evidence from Personnel Data” is forthcoming in Econometrica

The authors present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace. To evaluate whether the existence of social connections is beneficial to the firm’s overall performance, they explore how the effects of social connections vary with the strength of managerial incentives and worker’s ability. To do so, they combine panel data on individual worker’s productivity from personnel records with a natural field experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial incentives, from fixed wages, to bonuses based on the average productivity of the workers managed. The authors find that when managers are paid fixed wages, they favor workers to whom they are socially connected irrespective of the worker’s ability, but when they are paid performance bonuses, they target their effort towards high ability workers irrespective of whether they are socially connected to them or not. Although social connections increase the performance of connected workers, they find that favoring connected workers is detrimental for the firm’s overall performance.

Journal Editorship: Maitreesh Ghatak

Starting November 2008, Maitreesh Ghatak will be taking up the position of Co-Editor of Journal of Development Economics.