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Category: Development

Published January 11, 2012

Insecure Land Rights, Land Tenancy, and Sharecropping

Lac Alaotra, the "Rice Bowl" of Madagascar.

My job-market paper — for nonacademics, that’s the paper I presented when giving recruitment seminars when I was on the job market back in 2006 — is finally published.

From the latest issue of Land Economics:

Most studies of tenurial insecurity focus on its effects on investment. This paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and land tenancy contracts. Based on distinct features of formal law and customary rights in Madagascar, this paper augments the canonical model of sharecropping by making the strength of the landlord’s property right increasing in the amount of risk she bears within the contract. Using data on landlords’ subjective perceptions in rural Madagascar, empirical tests support the hypothesis that insecure property rights drive contract choice but offer little support in favor of the canonical risk sharing hypothesis.

After working on this on and off for almost ten years, I am glad to finally see this article in print.

Continue readingInsecure Land Rights, Land Tenancy, and Sharecropping
Published January 6, 2012

Always Something New Out of Africa?

[T]here is a great deal more to Africa than wars and famines.

The problem is that news, as defined by news editors throughout the media, is when something important or interesting happens. There is no conspiracy about African coverage (though there is a great deal of laziness among editors who are happy to limit their story selection to images of dramatic disasters.) And news organizations must cover stories of starvation and war as they would cover disasters in the rest of the world. The question is where are the African stories that show the fuller picture?

Years of covering Africa taught me not to go on holiday at Christmas or in August when nothing much happened in the world. That was when desperate news editors with space to fill might finally run that article on Namibia’s politics or Mali’s nomads. But there was always the eternal nagging news editor’s question: “So what?”

That’s Richard Dowden, in a post over at African Arguments.

In a way, it’s comforting to know that development economists are not alone, and that the “So what?” question is not exclusively asked to development economists by other, non-development economists.

Dowden’s Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, which I have read on Kim Yi Dionne‘s recommendation (it is compulsory reading in her African politics class), is a highly readable introduction to Africa in all its diversity. It’s a great read if, like me, your African experience is limited to about five countries. I imagine it’s an even better read if all you know about Africa is from reading the news.

Published January 2, 2012

Call for Papers: Pacific Conference on Development Economics 2012

I realized I had forgotten to post this call for papers for the PacDev 2012 conference, which will be held on March 17, 2012 at UC Davis:

The Pacific Conference on Development Economics (PacDev) is presented by the Bay Area Development Association, with sessions chaired by faculty from UC Berkeley, Stanford University, UC Davis, UC Riverside, UC San Diego, University of Southern California, University of San Francisco, Santa Clara University and San Francisco State University.

The goal of PacDev is to bring together graduate students, faculty and practitioners to present and discuss various issues facing developing economies today.

Please submit complete papers as a PDF attachment to pacdev@primal.ucdavis.edu. The deadline for submission is 5pm PST on 13 January 2012.

Contact authors will receive a decision on the status of their submission by 10 February 2012.

More information is available on the conference website.