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Midwest Group on African Political Economy

I am in College Station, TX tonight and tomorrow for the inaugural meeting of the Midwest Group on African Political Economy (MGAPE). The MGAPE is the brain child of Kim Yi Dionne (see her blog here, and her Twitter feed here) and is a sister organization to the Working Group on African Political Economy on the West Coast.

I am honored to have been asked to participate, and I am really excited about this conference because each paper gets an hour: ten minutes of presentation by the author, and 50 minutes of discussion by the group. I find this format much more rewarding than going to large conferences with multiple parallel sessions and 20 minutes per paper (with “comments” usually on the order of “Did you include household size as a dependent variable?”), given my opportunity cost of time.

Having spent the last three months (and then some) working on food prices, I will be presenting my paper with Chris Barrett and David Just on the welfare impacts of food price volatility in rural Ethiopia, but I will also discuss some work in progress.