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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · 12d

And it’s a wrap! #SMOQK 2025 at Concordia - 5 excellent papers in development economics. What a great community we have in the Sherbrooke Montreal Ottawa Quebec and Kingston area. See you again in a year!

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · 12d

And another set of amazing papers for the afternoon with @cmichaudleclerc.bsky.social (Laval), Zemar Hakim (Queens), and @caitbrownecon.bsky.social (Laval) #SMOQK2025

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · 12d

And we’re off! The 3rd annual SMOQK devo day at Concordia, with great presentations by Sylvain Dessy (Laval) Paula Lopez-Pena (Queens) this morning

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Reposted by Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦

VoxDev @voxdev.bsky.social · 22d

🆕 Roads to Ethiopia’s structural transformation

Today on VoxDev, Tasso Adamopoulos (York University) discusses how Ethiopia's large-scale road expansion accelerated structural transformation: voxdev.org/topic/macroe...

Roads to Ethiopia’s structural transformation

Ethiopia’s large-scale road expansion cut travel times to markets – boosting farm productivity, reshaping cropping patterns, and accelerating structural change.

voxdev.org

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Reposted by Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦

Mississippi Free Press @mississippifreepress.org · 22d

OPINION: "Pronatalists argue that there will be too few workers to sustain the economy and too many older people for those workers to support. However, that is not necessarily true—and even if it were, increasing birth rates wouldn’t fix the problem," Root et al. write.

buff.ly/EYgNpNm

Opinion | Falling Birth Rates Won’t Cause Population Decline

Root, Guzzo and Clark write about misconceptions associated with pronatalism and how a population decline is not imminent.

www.mississippifreepress.org

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 7

OMG

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Reposted by Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦

Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

Proud to share our paper on gender norms in 🇵🇾, out in the July 2025 issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change. With colleagues @McGill.ca and Fundación Capital, we ran a lab-in-the-field experiment to understand how an interactive digital application can influence beliefs about gender norms.

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

Link to paper: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

University of Chicago Press Journals: Cookie absent

www.journals.uchicago.edu

Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

Thanks for reading the thread this far, and hope you’ll read the paper.

If you like our work, stay tuned, as we are working on several new projects on gender norms in Latin America.

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

We also add to a recent but growing evidence base which documents misperceived gender norms. We find evidence among women in Paraguay. This suggests a further policy lever for encouraging gender transformative change – correcting misperceived norms.

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

We believe these results are important because they show promise that even a small and short-term dose of digital gender awareness interventions can shift normative beliefs towards gender equity and empowerment.

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

3rd: we find modest evidence that IgualdApp can influence normative beliefs in the domain of gender roles: it is associated with an increase in individual beliefs that men should take on more responsibilities at home (inclined towards gender equity and empowerment in this domain).

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

2nd: we find evidence of norm misperception: participants think their peers are more disinclined towards equity and empowerment than they actually are.

Bar chart of individual and common beliefs at baseline, by statement

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

1st: participants tend to be more inclined towards gender equity and empowerment than not, but there is heterogeneity, suggesting that some norms might be less well established than others.

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

We then elicited their individual and common beliefs again.

So what do we find?

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

Participants were then presented with information relating to gender in these three domains: they all received standard factual info, while ½ of the participants were also exposed to IgualdApp, Fundación Capital’s digital tool to promote gender transformative change.

Screenshot of IgualdApp's Main Menu page

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

We elicited individual beliefs about gender norms using Likert agreement responses to a set of normative statements related to three domains (gender roles, SRHR, and IPV). Common beliefs are measured by then converting this instrument into an incentivized coordination game.
L

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Sep 3

Proud to share our paper on gender norms in 🇵🇾, out in the July 2025 issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change. With colleagues @McGill.ca and Fundación Capital, we ran a lab-in-the-field experiment to understand how an interactive digital application can influence beliefs about gender norms.

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Reposted by Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦

Shelley Clark @shelleydclark.bsky.social · Jul 29

My coauthors @lesja.bsky.social @karenguzzo.bsky.social & I have a new piece in @theconversation.com , which offers insights into why most demographers do NOT think there is a current fertility crisis and the panic about population decline is unwarranted.
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theconversation.com/fears-that-f...

Fears that falling birth rates in US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions

While the changes in population structure that accompany low birth rates are real, the impact of these changes has been dramatically overstated.

theconversation.com

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Jun 26

Fact

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Jun 12

It's the same in my house, except with the following bookends:

child the night before: `Make sure you wake me up before 7:00am'

child at 8:00am: `why did you let me sleep in? Now I don't have time for breakfast'

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Reposted by Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦

VoxDev @voxdev.bsky.social · Jun 6

🆕 Can talking about girls’ education improve educational outcomes?

Today on VoxDev, Chris Cotton (Queen's University), Ardyn Nordstrom (Carleton University), Jordan Nanowski (CMHC) & Eric Richert (University of Chicago) outline evidence on girls' education in Zimbabwe: voxdev.org/topic/educat...

Can talking about girls’ education improve educational outcomes?

Evidence from Zimbabwe suggests that dialogue-based engagement campaigns can be effective in increasing enrolment and learning, which is consistent with improving perceptions around the value of girls...

voxdev.org

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Apr 29

👀

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Apr 29

Lol, yes, that's what I've got. But I have a memory of a site where you could select a handful

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Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Apr 28

Still a few hours to go cast your vote!

#democracyisawesome

Sonia Laszlo 🇨🇦 @slaszlo.bsky.social · Apr 28

Dear Canada,

Happy election day!! 🎉 🗳️

Just one simple thing to do: cast your vote! Vote your heart out! Make yourself heard!

I assume you understand your assignment, yes?

Merci, thank you.

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