Weekly links February 20: is that event study valid? Industrial development, nation building, local research, and more… David McKenzie February 20, 2026 This page in: English © 2026 The World Bank Group,

https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations/weekly-links-february-20--is-that-event-study-valid--industrial- The child penalty revisited: Andreas Backhaus at Plausibly Exogenous summarizes a recent paper that argues that the exogeneity of treatment timing assumption underlying the event study design seems suspect – and work using more plausible assumptions about timing exogeneity based on IVF suggests a 7% rather than 20% penalty. Good for thinking about all these event study/mover-design approaches in general. The Economist has more on the gender wage gap, both that same paper and also work by “Camille Landais … and others. It looks at women with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a rare condition in which a girl is born without a uterus but otherwise develops normally. These women know early in life that they will not bear children, and so differ from those who discover this after failing to conceive naturally or through IVF. This could influence their future wages, since women who plan to conceive may make different investments in their human capital. © 2026 The World Bank Group,