EGC Quarterly Newsletter, Spring 2026: Read the Economic Growth Center Annual Report

We are pleased to share the Yale Economic Growth Center’s 2025 annual report. The past academic year marked the completion of EGC’s 2020-25 strategic plan to strengthen the Center and expand its impact. Launched in 2020, the period was bracketed by the global COVID-19 crisis at its start, and an upending of the global order in trade and development aid in 2025.

The EGC was founded in 1961, to provide data-based insights at a time when the world was in the midst of a great shift away from colonialism and towards global aid. Now we likely find ourselves at another historical precipice: global aid institutions are retreating, the rule-based international order is ending, and the spread of AI is changing labor markets and will impact economic growth in ways still unclear. But amidst these challenges, opportunities will arise to redefine and strengthen the foundations of sustainable and inclusive economic growth.

Over the past five years EGC has deepened our work and strengthened our institutional base. Our mission remains unchanged, but we are now better equipped to interpret and assist in a rapidly evolving global economy, whatever challenges the next horizon may bring.

We invite you to explore this year's EGC Annual Report: Growth in a Shifting Landscape — and as always, welcome your thoughts on our priorities in the years ahead. 

Douglas Irwin delivered the 35th Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture, "Trade Policy and Exchange Rate Reform: A Look Back at History," on Thursday, March 26 from 4-5:30pm. Irwin is the John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College.

Researchers affiliated with Yale Inclusion Economics and Inclusion Economics India Centre have worked over the past decade with India’s Ministry of Rural Development, which operates the world's largest productive safety net program, to support program monitoring with user-centered, mobile-enabled data visualisation and process tracking. 

A randomized trial in two Indian states, with a combined population of over 100 million people, found that providing local officials easier access to program information reduced payment delays and increased work provision–⁠delivering 170 times the program’s cost in benefits to workers (brief and working paper). The research team  continued working closely with the government and their software engineers to integrate these evidence-backed features into a new digital application, which was just launched in the last few weeks.

Despite decades of progress, gender gaps in education and labor markets persist worldwide, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. In a recent conversation, two participants in EGC’s Kuznets Visitors Program – Ieda Matavelli, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales, and Girija Borker, a research economist at the World Bank – discussed how their work sheds light on these challenges.

Drawing on sources like Civil War records and ancient Chinese poetry, two economic historians discuss how their work informs contemporary debates on the economic dimensions of gender and race. 

Ahead of a new workshop series, two researchers discuss how experiments can complement traditional tools in economics, deepen our understanding of behavior, and guide more informed policy debates.

Research co-authored by EGC Director Rohini Pande, and affiliate Nicholas Ryan has won an award for sustainable business from UC Berkeley Haas Center for Responsible Business. The research, co-authored with the University of Chicago’s Michael Greenstone and Anant Sudarshan of the University of Warwick, was conducted in Surat, in the Indian state of Gujarat, where manufacturing contributes heavily to particulate matter pollution.

Two EGC affiliated faculty have been named fellows by the International Economic Association. The awards, to Fabrizio Zilibotti and EGC director Rohini Pande, were among seven made this year by the global professional organization of economists. In the past, faculty members Pinelopi Goldberg, Lorenzo Caliendo, and Samuel Kortum have also been named fellows.

Leah Boustan delivered the annual AEA Distinguished Lecture, "Where are the Streets of Gold? Immigrant assimilation in the US and Europe," at the American Economic Association conference in Philadelphia on January 3, 2026. During the lecture, she presented new findings on how recent immigrant assimilation patterns across Europe show some similarities, but also some critical differences compared to the US. 

New in VoxDev, EGC affiliate Kaivan Munshi and coauthors examine evidence that uncovers how institutional features of the marriage market are behind persistent sex selection in India.

The new Global Gender Distortions Index (GGDI) quantifies the impact of gender gaps in the labor market, shedding light on how much higher economic activity would be if women had the same opportunities as men. 

On December 5, 2025, EGC hosted its first Experimental Economics Workshop on Discrimination and Prejudice, highlighting research from early- and mid-career scholars in behavioral and experimental economics. This was the first event in a series of planned Experimental Economics Workshops that EGC and YIE will host. Organized by Maria Kogelnik, the event offered new evidence on how people respond to incentives, norms, and institutional interventions, alongside what these responses imply for policy design.

From hiring practices and gender constraints to trade shocks, technology, and urban geography, the internal and external factors impacting firms are far from uniform. Evidence presented at the Firms, Trade, and Development Conference 2025 shows how these frictions interact to influence productivity, worker outcomes, and inclusive growth across developing economies.

Argente on consumer surplus from using alternative payment methods; Espín-Sánchez on how changes to water allocation markets in Spain affect rich and poor farmers; Lindenlaub on how labor market disruptions following childbirth relate to intra-household consumption inequality; Restrepo on the effects of automation in a task-based economy; Tsyvinski on new frontiers in research on industrial decarbonization; Van Patten on how popular attitudes towards trade are driven by economic fundamentals using results from a Costa Rican national referendum; Zilibotti on the scaling effects of parental intervention on peer groups.