Dear all,
November has been another busy month for PEDL with three calls closing and another seven projects selected for funding. Our 1st CDC-sponsored MRG Call on Development Finance is soon to close with a last chance to submit an EOI fast approaching (15 Dec). We are also greatly looking forward to our Young Scholars Matchmaking Workshop and Conference taking place in early December. Attendance at the conference is open to all in the field and we hope to see many of you there!
Find out more about PEDL's ongoing work below:
- 1st CDC MRG Call on Development Finance
- PEDL 2020 Conference on Firms in Low-income Countries
- New C-19 Note
- Newly-funded projects
- Information for open PEDL grants affected by COVID-19
And keep updated on our calls:
- Open and upcoming calls
- Closed calls
As we approach the end of the year, we hope you are all well and looking forward to 2021!
Best,
The PEDL Team
1st CDC MRG Call on Development Finance
PEDL is accepting applications for Major Research Grant projects researching the role of development finance: investments in private sector development that are impact-led but commercially rigorous. Please note that for this call, a one-page expression of interest is required before applications are submitted. EOIs must be submitted by 15 December 2020 to [email protected]. EOIs should clearly state the relevance of the research to CDC Group.
CDC Group, the UK’s development finance institution, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) are sponsoring this new research initiative aimed at understanding the impact of development finance on private sector development. Issues of interest include the effect of investment on private sector growth; the characteristics of high-growth firms and how they impact on their sectors and localities; supporting quality jobs, gender and climate finance; and production and distribution of broader inclusive products and services. Researchers will ideally partner with specific CDC investments, or alternatively work with other businesses sufficiently comparable to build our understanding of the importance of investment in private sector growth.
MRGs are grants of £100,000 or more. There is no formal upper limit, but past MRGs have averaged around £300,000. These grants will fund research assistance, data collection and new surveys in CDC-priority countries and (if necessary) teaching buyouts for the principal investigator.
Applications should be submitted by 23:59 GMT, 21 December 2020. Find out more about the areas of particular interest for this call as well as further details on applying here.
PEDL 2020 Conference on Firms in Low-income Countries
The PEDL programme is hosting a two-day virtual conference with presentations by rising young scholars on 10-11 December.
Participation is open to all students and researchers working in this field. Please register for participation here, using your institutional email address. Connection details will be provided to participants upon registration. The event will be streamed live on YouTube (Day 1, Day 2), where recordings will be available for a limited amount of time after the event.
See the full list of presentations below:
- Firm Heterogeneity, Demand for Quality and Misallocation: Evidence from India - Apoorv Gupta (Dartmouth)
- Search Costs and Relational Contracting: The Impact of a Digital Phonebook on Small Business Supply Chains - Jessica Rudder (UC Davis)
- Unwilling to Train? Firm Responses to the Colombian Apprenticeship Regulation - Santiago Caicedo (Clemson University)
- Measuring Actual TFP Growth: Stripping away Omitted Price Bias and Demand Shocks - Nida Jamil (Lahore School of Economics)
- Formalized Employee Search and Labor Demand - Tsegay Gebrekidan Tekleselassie (Policy Studies Institute)
- Competition and Market Power in Developing Markets: Evidence from Fertilizer Markets in India - Beáta Itin-Shwartz (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
- Worker Mobility and Domestic Production Networks - Cian Ruane (International Monetary Fund)
- Creative Destruction or Just Destruction? Effects of Floods on Manufacturing Establishments in India - Farzana Hossain (University of Melbourne)
- Misconduct and Reputation under Imperfect Information - Francis Annan (Georgia State University)
- How Does Caste Affect Entrepreneurship? Birth versus Worth - Sampreet Goraya (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
- Contracting and Quality Upgrading: Evidence from an Experiment in Senegal - Joshua Deutschmann (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
- The Impact of Labor Law Reforms in Frictional Labor Markets - Gaurav Chiplunkar (University of Virginia)
More details on the agenda can be found here. Please feel free to share this with your network. We look forward to seeing you there!
New C-19 Note
Summarising the research currrently being undertaken by PEDL-funded projects on COVID-19, PEDL's new series of publications has released a new article:
- India’s Food Supply Chain during the Pandemic - Matt Lowe and Benjamin Roth
Newly-Funded Projects
PEDL has selected seven new projects for funding this month. We are excited to see these projects develop in the coming year:
- Can mobile money adoption induce microenterprises to formalize? Evidence from a field experiment in Burkina Faso - Serge Ky (University of Ouahigouya) & Clovis Rugemintwari (University of Limoges)
- Kinship pressure and employee selection - Nicholas Swanson (UC Berkeley)
- Firm Culture: Can Information Interventions Reduce
- Gender Gaps in Online Labor Markets? - Francis Annan (Georgia State), Belinda Archibong (Barnard College), Anja Benshaul-Tolonen (Barnard College) & Oyebola Okunogbe (World Bank)
- Employee-Employer Database Construction, Firm-Productivity and Labour Market Inequality: Evidence from Developing Countries - Idrissa Diagne (ENSAE, Senegal), Yaya Diallo (McGill University) and Ibrahima Sarr (Laval University)
- How Do Managers’ Beliefs about New Technologies Evolve? Informational Interventions and the Adoption of Energy-Efficient Stitching Motors in Bangladesh - Ritam Chaurey (Johns Hopkins), Gaurav Nayyar (World Bank), Siddharth Sharma (World Bank) and Eric Verhoogen (Columbia University)
- Effects of Referring Business Partners on Firm Networks and Performance - Jing Cai (University of Maryland) and Adam Szeidl (Central European University)
- Market Concentration, Rent Extraction and Minimum Wage in Senegal - Léo Czajka (Catholic University of Louvain) and Bassirou Sarr (Paris School of Economics)
Information for open PEDL grants affected by COVID-19
With the ongoing uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, PEDL expects significant disruption to ongoing projects. We want to assure our grantees that we are continuing to offer as much flexibility as possible so that projects can be completed. To this end, projects that foresee or are experiencing disruption should contact the PEDL team at [email protected] if they have not done so already.
Open and Upcoming Calls
Listed here are all open and upcoming calls for proposals for PEDL funding and their respective deadlines. Please bear in mind that dates for upcoming calls are provisional and may change.
Open calls:
- 21 Dec 2020 - 1st CDC MRG Call on Development Finance (expression of interest required before full application)
Upcoming calls (before March 2021):
- TBC - 1st Special MRG Call on Climate Change
- TBC - 2nd Special ERG Call on Climate Change
Closed Calls
PEDL's 1st CDC ERG Call on Development Finance and 34th Regular ERG Call closed in November. Decisions are expected to be sent out in February/March 2021. Our 8th Regular MRG Call also closed. Applicants will be notified in May 2021.
The evaluation of the 1st Special ERG Call on Climate Change is ongoing. Decisions will likely be returned in January 2021.
