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EAAE Quality of Research Discovery Award for Bellemare, Barrett, and Just (2013)

Last updated on August 25, 2014

No, this is not a repost of this previous post of mine. Similar prize for sure, but different professional association. Whereas my previous post was about the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), this time, my coauthors and I have won the European Association of Agricultural Economists’ (EAAE) Quality of Research Discovery award for my paper titled “The Welfare Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia.”

As per the EAAE’s website, to win the Quality of Research Discovery award,

The research must be a significant contribution to the field of knowledge in any of the areas of agricultural economics. The work should demonstrate excellence in research and may deal with conceptual as well as empirical analysis of a relevant issue.

I’ve discussed our award-winning paper many times on this blog, but here is the abstract in case you are new here:

How does commodity price volatility affect the welfare of rural households in developing countries, for whom hedging and consumption smoothing are often difficult? When governments choose to intervene in order to stabilize commodity prices, as they often do, who gains the most? This article develops an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to answer those questions, along with illustrative empirical results based on panel data from rural Ethiopian households. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility are increasing in household income, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.

Winning both the American and European associations’ quality of research discovery awards is a very nice honor for us. First and foremost, I think research on attitudes to price risk is tremendously important — welfare is defined over both income and prices, but the bulk of research done on risk in economics has focused on income and has ignored the vector of prices in v(p,w) — and it has been nice to bring attention back to the excellent research done by our predecessors: Sandmo (1971) on producers’ attitudes to price risk, Turnovsky et al. (1980) on consumers’ attitudes to price risk, and Finkelshtain and Chalfant (1991) on agricultural households’ — which are both consumers and producers — attitudes to price risk.

Second, as I have mentioned before, our article has been rejected four times before the AJAE gave us a chance to revise and resubmit it. Throughout all of that process, however, we always knew we were working on a topic that was too important to abandon.