Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
The Guardian has put together a page of resources for students of development policy.
Those resources include a reading list for those who are new to the topic, a list of people to follow on Twitter, and a guide to publicly available development data.
Well worth checking out, especially if you are thinking of studying development in graduate school or if you have a term paper to write in a development class this semester.
From a new working paper by Xavier Giné, Jessica Goldberg, and Dean Yang:
We report the results of a randomized field experiment that examines the credit market impacts of improvements in a lender’s ability to determine borrowers’ identities. Improved personal identification enhances the credibility of a lender’s dynamic repayment incentives by allowing it to withhold future loans from past defaulters and expand credit for good borrowers. The experimental context, rural Malawi, is characterized by an imperfect identification system. Consistent with a simple model of borrower heterogeneity and information asymmetries, fingerprinting led to substantially higher repayment rates for borrowers with the highest ex ante default risk, but had no effect for the rest of the borrowers. The change in repayment rates is driven by reductions in adverse selection (smaller loan sizes) and lower moral hazard (for example, less diversion of loan-financed fertilizer from its intended use on the cash crop).
The Center for Global Development‘s Charles Kenny, in his weekly column for Foreign Policy:
With supermarket chains from Whole Foods to Safeway trumpeting their healthy produce from farmers just down the road, buying local and eating non-genetically modified (GM) organic food is surely the best thing for you and the planet. And that’s something government should get behind, right?