As part of our interview series, we ask renowned experts in the field about the future of research in development economics, and for their advice for young researchers. For our third interview, we got the opportunity to talk to David McKenzie.
David McKenzie is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group, Finance, and Private Sector Development Unit at the World Bank. He received his B.Com.(Hons)/B.A. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. He is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of Development Economics, the World Bank Economic Review, and Migration Studies. He is also a co-founder and regular contributor to the Development Impact blog.
ETRM: How would you define development economics on the frontier currently? And given your experience with non-academic institutions, what do you think are the main areas that still need more research on and are of interest for policymakers?
David: It’s obviously a very broad topic and it’s one that I’ve been thinking about as I look through everyone’s job market applications, in which I’m leading our recruitment this year and so seeing what people think is development economics. One of the nice things is just how broad development economics is. I see at the heart of it that are really driving a lot of policy discussions are very much still the old topics of how we increase productivity in poor countries. How do we raise the incomes of poor people? How do we create more jobs? These are the fundamental things and it’s surprising how few job market papers are really that helpful in trying to address those types of issues. And then the sort of issue that comes up a lot more recently is related to the green agenda of how we all do this in a sustainable way. The World Bank changed its mission statement to reflect that: trying to reduce poverty and increasing growth in a sustainable way.
ETRM: You seem to balance research which includes field work, policy work, and other outreach work like the development impact blog. Do you have any tips/suggestions for young researchers on how to manage research projects, meetings, and own work etc.?
David: I think it’s one of those things that sustained practice helps a lot. I know I’m very fortunate that I get to write in my first language although people think my New Zealand accent is a little hard to understand sometimes may argue on that one. I am a fast writer and that helps a lot. I don’t have to teach and so not having to spend time teaching also frees up a lot of time. Now, that time is spent with policy work and with advising operational work at the World Bank, but there’s a lot of synergies with the questions that come up in that work or with the things that I’m asked to assist with that lead into research. But it’s something that I struggle with as well.
I think the biggest challenge is trying to figure out what I want to accomplish in the week versus what others want me to accomplish. It’s very easy to have your inbox drive your entire day and the number of requests sent. And it seems like you’re being productive when you’re just answering all these emails and doing little bits and pieces. Just carving out and blocking off time, I intend to be more productive. ‘Okay, I’m not going to do anything apart from what I said I was going to do this week, and everything else can wait till later’ is one of the things that I try to do.
Another one of the trickiest things with development is the time zones. The times that you want to be working are often the only times that work for people in the country that you’re working with, and so, trying to work with that. The other thing is just working with a team and trying not to be the bottleneck. A lot of my work is on improving management and trying to look at what helps firms be better managed and thinking through their production processes. Two things I take from these work that I need to continually remind myself. One is thinking about what these bottlenecks is that when you get something off your desk, it can allow for other people to be more productive. The second thing is this work that we’ve done on personal initiative where you’re trying to just say what did today look like and how can I make sure tomorrow is not just replicating the same if it didn’t go as well as it did? Looking for those avenues to just try and keep changing things a little bit so that you don’t get stuck in a rut is useful.
ETRM: When it comes to the job market, many students are conflicted between applying to university settings or more research institute positions. While you have had extensive experience at the Bank, before that you also had experience working at a university. We wanted to know your opinions on any key differences between these different types of settings and what made you choose one over the other?
David: My advice for graduate students is to apply broadly. It is much easier to make a choice when it’s between concrete options than abstract options. There’s some academic jobs that really leave very little time for research and have huge teaching loads and some that have very low teaching lots. There are some non-academic jobs that having very little time for research and some that had a lot of time for research. Where I sit at the World Bank, I have a lot of time for research and as much as I would in a university. Two thirds of my job is pretty similar. There is this sense of how much you want to be able to interact with policy and work at that frontline of trying to influence things directly versus how much you want to focus on teaching which is also very valuable. I do some summer courses and I enjoy teaching. Still, I think, that’s the big difference. Both are quite hard when you first graduate. You have been focused very narrowly on one thing for a long time and then having to set up whole new courses and advise students when you are just figuring out things yourself felt quite difficult when I started at Stanford.
There was a nice paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives recently where they’ve linked the Census Bureau tax data records to the survey of doctorates and they look at movements back and forth between academia and non-academia. One of the things that graduate students often get told by their advisors is that there is a one way door: that you can always leave academia, but you can never come back. I think one of the nice things in that paper is to say no, that’s not true, actually people can go back and forth and we see that in the World Bank. We have people that come into the research group and then get hired by universities, and we hire people from universities. We’re seeing that with some of the tech jobs and some of the other jobs at the Fed. It is not as much of a dichotomy as I think it used to be in the old days. People have a lot of constraints in terms of location issues and it’s just hard to find a job so I would think a little bit about whether you want to really be completely directing your own research program and having a tenure clock ticking over you and all those things, but there’s a lot of similarity between jobs I think more than big differences.
ETRM: That is very insightful. Instead of categorizing them as university or research institutes, you may think of how much research is part of the job and what kind of research you want to do, and then decide based on that.
David: I should just say the last thing on that is the publication process is obviously very painful. A lot of people like doing research but don’t like the last part of the process of turning it into publications. That’s something you learn about yourself. Some people like jobs where they get to do research, but they’d have it immediately put into action and not have to spend three years getting it published at the end, and some really like doing that last process too. And I think there’s value in it, but it’s obviously painful for us all.
ETRM: We know that you publish extensively and in a range of topics. We were wondering how do you get all your research ideas, and how do you know which ideas are worth developing?
David: I think the second part is always a little bit of a tricky one and I think maybe a bit different because of the job that I have where some of the things that I do at are very demand driven, where people are coming with real policy questions. So then you’re thinking about what do we know already, what can you know, and what is politically feasible in the context. Is this interesting enough to build research around that will help them even if it may not end up getting published. Some of the things I do may not get published in top journal. Some people may come to me with a problem, and then I’m just trying to brainstorm to solve the problem. Once you start having a research agenda, each time you do something you realize how little you know, and how many more questions come up. There’s a range of things that I’ve been working on for a while where you do one thing you find out a little bit more, but then that opens up the next set of questions. I think it is useful to work on a topic for a while and start to learn where all the things that you don’t know are. I jumped around topics a lot early in my career, and it took me a little while to land on the areas that I was probably most productive at or where I felt that others were at least as interested in the questions as I was.
Early in my career, I was coming at it more from a methods point of view of developing these tools because I have some applications in mind, but then where else could I apply this tool versus what’s an interesting question necessarily. I still work a bit on methodology. Once you start trying to work on these problems, you realize that the tools that you see a lot of people using are not quite been applied in the way that you think they should be. Or that you think there’s some things that could be done a bit better
When working on tools, if I can see a direct use for myself, and I can see others wanting to use it then I’m not just doing this because it’s intellectually interesting, but I see it as something that others will use. One of the projects that I’ve been most excited about recently is this work that I’m still revising with Rachael Meager and Leonardo Iacovone on using Bayesian methods and impact evaluation. And so there, I’d read some textbook treatments. I’d been working on lots of experiments with small samples, and then started trying to think about how can we incorporate some of the information that we have from outside of the experiment. Then reaching out to people that know more than you do to try and learning how to use these tools a bit and then bring it in. I think that brainstorming with others and working with people who can teach you and as well as using your skills has been a big way where I get ideas, just from those collaborations. The other way to get new ideas when I first started was teaching graduate class for the first time where I have been working on the same job market set of papers for a long time and then having to sit back and teach a broader view of development helped me think these other areas where I hadn’t been thinking about and that I need to explain well.
The final place where you get ideas is obviously through fieldwork. Just going in and talking with business owners and understanding why they do things the way they do and what some of the constraints they face are. Particularly I think, this view of things that seem obvious but they’re not doing, why is that the case? Is it that we’re wrong, or is it that there’s some constraints in the way and then, thinking about can we alleviate that constraint if it’s constrained or can we figure out why we’re wrong? Why our theory doesn’t quite give the right predictions is always interesting to think about.
