Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
If you have any interest in agriculture, development, and food policy, the news item this week was British environmental activist Mark Lynas‘ “coming out” in favor of GMOs.
Lynas announced that his position had changed in the context of his lecture to the 2013 Oxford Farming Conference, which you can watch here:
If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, here is an excerpt from a post on Lynas’ blog:
Despite more than a decade of NGO and government activities promoting developing world farmer participation in high-value agricultural markets, evidence regarding the household welfare effects of such initiatives is limited. This article analyzes the geographic placement of supermarket supply chains in Nicaragua between 2000 and 2008 and uses a difference-in-differences specification on measures of supplier and nonsupplier assets to estimate the welfare effects of small farmer participation. Though results indicate that selling to supermarkets increases household productive asset holdings, they also suggest that only farmers with advantageous endowments of geography and water are likely to participate.
The abstract of a new article by my friend, coauthor, and grad school colleague Hope Michelson in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Here is recent ungated version the paper.
That’s the title of my most recent article, which was published by the Journal of Development Studies just before the holidays:
Using data from the Philippines, we study the impact of mobile phones on the prices agricultural producers receive for their cash crop. We first look at the impact on price of mobile phone ownership at the household level. Because this masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity, we then look at the impact on price of the intrahousehold allocation of mobile phones. We find that whether the household owns a mobile phone has no impact on price, but whether a farmer or spouse owns a mobile phone is associated with a 5- to 8-per cent increase in price.
For those of you without an institutional subscription, here is an ungated version of the paper.
If you are looking for longer discussions of the paper, I have blogged about it here and here.