Strategic Intellectual Pursuits or Selection Effects?

Now here is a tough nut to crack. How can we disentangle supply and demand effects? Are journals biased towards certain countries? Are researchers internalizing these biases and planning their research accordingly? Or is there something to be said about barriers to entry into different countries (safety, language, local human capacity) and how that impacts the quality of the research and the type of researcher they attract...?

This seems important since research on different developing countries is, well, a necessary condition for evidence-based policy-making. But to move to a high level equilibrium we need the best researchers to have an incentive to learn more about experiences in different countries and academic journals, conditional on the quality of the analysis, to be ready to reward them for it.

When you read the paper attached, which is mostly descriptive, think about the research design that would allow us to distinguish between these competing hypotheses...