On Monday, I gave a Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar (MADS) at the Center for Global Development (CGD). According to the CGD website:
The MADS is a ten year-old research seminar series that brings some of the world’s leading development scholars to discuss their new research and ideas. The presentations meet an academic standard of quality and are at times technical, but retain a focus on a mixed audience of researchers and policymakers.
The title of my talk was “Food Prices and Riots: Estimating How the Level and Volatility of Food Prices Shape Social Unrest in the Developing world, 1990-2011.” I presented results from this paper, which I have often talked about on this blog. The slides for my talk are available here.
One of the interesting things about presenting in the MADS series is that you get a discussant. My discussant was my friend and colleague Ed Carr, who is an associate professor of geography at the University of South Carolina and who is currently on leave at the US Agency for International Development.
It was very nice to get Ed’s very insightful comments given how much work he has done on agricultural development and on the environment (he discusses a lot of his work in his recent book, Delivering Development). And given his expertise on climate change, Ed was the ideal person to discuss my paper, given my use of natural disasters to identify the causal relationship flowing from food prices to social unrest.