Seema Jayachandran
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seema.bsky.social
Seema Jayachandran
@seema.bsky.social

Economics professor at Princeton. I study environmental conservation, gender equality, and (too many) other topics in developing countries.
seemajayachandran.com

Seema Jayachandran is an economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Her research interests include development economics, health economics, and labor economics. .. more

Economics 30%
Environmental science 23%
Pinned
I argue in this piece that the nonprofit sector should be thinking more about the counterfactual when assessing fundraising success: winning a $2M competitive bid over capable peers advances the cause less than convincing someone to donate $1M they'd have spent on a yacht.
The Case for Counterfactual Thinking in Nonprofit Fundraising
When a nonprofit wins a major government contract or foundation grant, it’s cause for celebration. These wins reflect hard work and organizational strength. Yet beneath the success lies a subtle, ofte...
www.cgdev.org
A reminder that the US killed 80 people in Venezuela, and it would be nice if the US media cared enough to think that the life of a grandmother in Caracas whose building is destroyed by a US bomb matters as much as the life of a person in the US.
And on this kind of garbage hang the fates of nations

Reposted by Richard S.J. Tol

"Using the quasi-random timing of Navratri—a major Hindu festival worshipping goddesses—I find that girls born
shortly after the festival receive ~6% more birth vaccinations than girls born just before."

josuedjossou.github.io/navratri-paper.pdf

(stumbled across this, intrigued, haven't read it)
Endless Column, by Constantin Brâncuși, 1938, 📸 by @stephenmally

Reposted by Caroline Krafft

If you're at the ASSA mtgs and are interested in gender gaps in the labor market, please join this session Monday 8 am. To draw out the links between the papers, there will be one discussant, a nice idea suggested by @profnoto.bsky.social; Camille Landais is generously playing this role.

You draft the tweet when you submit an NBER paper, but I swear I didn't write this ungrammatical tweet.

Reposted by Seema Jayachandran

NBER @nber.org · 3d
Reviewing how much power do women have in their households in developing countries and why household power matters, from @seema.bsky.social and Alessandra Voena www.nber.org/papers/w34605
This should not be shrugged aside. They have stopped with the fake 22 million illegal immigrants things and are flat out saying we want to deport 10's of millions of citizens and legal residents from "third world countries" Basically they are advocating removing 1/3 of the population on a gov site.
pound for pound this might be the funniest thing ever written

Reposted by Matthias Doepke

New NBER working paper with Alessandra Voena on women's power in the household in LMICs.

I'd never found a review article on this topic that met my needs as a PhD class reading, so we sought to fill this gap.

NBER : www.nber.org/papers/w34605
Ungated: seemajayachandran.com/womens_power_JEL.pdf
“Rather than dismantling the excesses of the woke era, the new Trump-friendly programs and policies simply repurposed them to serve a different ideological agenda. The result is a new orthodoxy even more stifling than the last.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/o...
Opinion | Harvard’s New Campus Orthodoxy Is Even More Stifling Than the Old
www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Raphaël Soubeyran

Brilliant little online tool: Spin the globe and see what your life would have been like had you gotten a different draw in the place-of-birth lottery

h/t @leightjessica.bsky.social on LinkedIn
Birth Lottery
If you were reborn today, where would you land? And how would that change your life?
www.givingwhatwecan.org
Tariff offset tax

Laquan McDonald
watched part of a pod save interview with rahm emanuel and that guy is genuinely delusional if he thinks he is going to go anywhere in a democratic presidential primary

Reposted by Seema Jayachandran

As of today, I don't think it should be called the Streisand effect anymore. Congrats, Barbra, you're free.

How terribly sad. I only spent time with him once, for a couple of days many years ago, but he made a lasting impression on me as an incredibly good-natured person. RIP.

Reposted by Seema Jayachandran

watched part of a pod save interview with rahm emanuel and that guy is genuinely delusional if he thinks he is going to go anywhere in a democratic presidential primary

Reposted by Seema Jayachandran

they're calling it The Second News Story That's Definitely Going Away

Reposted by Seema Jayachandran

Trump is now trying to name while classes of Navy ships after himself: “Trump has for years advocated for revamping America’s fleet of warships, which he has said are ‘terrible-looking.’” Via WSJ
New Class of Warship to Be Named After President Trump — The Wall Street Journal
The new vessels, which the president calls battleships, will be the latest in what the White House envisions as a ‘Golden Fleet’
apple.news

Now do one for PhD advising
The networks of economists who frequently show up in the Economic Report of the President.

What stands out to you?

Reposted by Seema Jayachandran

The networks of economists who frequently show up in the Economic Report of the President.

What stands out to you?

The Govt of India is dismantling the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, and that's a real shame.
P B Mehta writes: MNREGA was the ground beneath our feet. It’s slipping away
One of the principal arguments advanced against the MGNREGA is that it raises wages. This concern underlies the clamour to restrict the scheme to the agricultural off-season. But in the context of the...
indianexpress.com
I don’t know how it works at the New York Times, but my editors at The Guardian would never let me publish this if they knew that I was one of the elites who spent time with Epstein. And if I published it without telling them, I would be out of a job.
These are the people who are willing to go on the record.
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/u...

Reposted by Seema Jayachandran

We need better ways to tell computers and humans apart

Article: The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
There is a growing problem of big name natural-science journals publishing social science that is "problematic".

This reflects a inability to accept the statistical standards and skills in social science are often much much higher than in many areas of the natural sciences.

(I'm a chemist btw).
You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…