It has been a while since I wrote about the relationship between food prices and food riots, which remains one of the reasons why many of you have discovered this blog or my Twitter feed.
That’s because for the past 10 months, my paper on food prices and food riots was going through the editorial process at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE), the top journal in my field, where it was conditionally accepted last Thursday. You can find the conditionally accepted version here, warts and all. Here are the highlights of the paper:
- There is a positive relationship between the FAO’s food price index and a count of LexisNexis stories about food riots. There is a negative relationship between the three-month historical volatility of the FAO’s food price index and the count of stories about food riots. In other words, more volatile food prices are associated with fewer food riots.
- Upon closer inspection, and tapping into the natural disasters–food prices–food riots nexus so as to exogenize the FAO’s food price index by conditioning it on natural disasters, the positive relationship between food prices and food riots appears to be causal.
- Even when instrumenting food prices with natural disasters, the negative relationship between food price volatility and food riots remains.
- Omitting food price volatility, the positive, presumably causal relationship flowing from food prices to food riots remains. In other words, that relationship is not a statistical artifact due to the fact that I control for both the mean and variance of the food price series.
- When omitting the food price level and focusing only on food price volatility, the negative relationship between food price volatility and food riots becomes statistically insignificant. So at best, more volatile food prices are associated with fewer food riots. At worst, there is no relation between the two.
Like I told the AJAE editor in charge of this manuscript, I believe that this is one of my best pieces, perhaps the best (for me, it’s a close tie between this one and my 2013 article with Chris Barrett and David Just on the welfare impacts of food price volatility in rural Ethiopia), and I am happy that it is about to get off of my desk.
The process for this paper — I wrote it in 2011, it will likely not be published until late 2014, maybe early 2015 — made me appreciate Paul Krugman’s observation that journals have become mausoleums for our papers (though they serve a very useful credentialing role): When I released the working paper version, I got a whole lot of attention from policy makers and the media because the world’s attention was focused on high food prices and food riots. I doubt the published version will generate as much attention given that food prices have come back down from their high levels of 2008 and 2011.