Last updated on April 11, 2011
As I wrote about on Friday, this weekend was the inaugural meeting of the Midwest Group on African Political Economy (MGAPE), a group that aims at bringing together economists and political scientists working on development policy in Africa.
This first meeting was a success. I presented my paper on the welfare impacts of price volatility in Ethiopia. Rachel Beatty Riedl, from Northwestern, presented a paper on the impact of religion on African politics; Jeff Conroy-Krutz, from Michigan State University, presented the sketch of a paper in which he will explore the industrial organization of vote buying in Uganda; and Harounan Kazianga, from Oklahoma State University, presented a paper in which he and his coauthors discuss the results of a randomized controlled trial aimed at studying the effects of school feeding programs and take-home rations in Burkina Faso.
Unfortunately, I had to leave early, so I missed the last two presentations. The first was by Jennifer Brass, from Indiana University, who presented a paper studying whether NGOs undermine state legitimacy in Kenya. The second paper was by Kim Yi Dionne, our host for the weekend, who studies ethnic competition among the individuals who applied to work as field research assistants in Malawi.
So instead of seeing Jen and Kim present and of discussing their papers, I had to look at this for two and a half hours:
