Skip to content

Category: Micro

Published May 3, 2011

Confusing Busyness with Productivity

Last week, Jean-Marie Baland (who was my colleague while I was on research leave at the University of Namur last year, and who is himself on leave at Harvard this year) was visiting Duke. One of the two talks Jean-Marie gave was about “The Distributional Implications of Group Lending,” in which him and his coauthors show that in most cases, group lending is more beneficial to the middle class than it is to the poor.

Continue readingConfusing Busyness with Productivity
Published May 2, 2011

High Food Prices: Despite Claims to the Contrary, US Farmers Are Still Doing Well

One of my coauthors was in town all of last week, so the little time we didn’t spend working on our paper was spent tending to the students in the two classes I was teaching this semester. This explains why I haven’t blogged in almost a week.

Still, I have managed to bookmark everything that has happened to catch my eye last week, and so this week’s blogging will be a mixture of new and (one-week-) old items.

The first of these items was a post by Tufts University’s Parke Wilde discussing a report by Tim Wise, from the Global Development and Environment (GDAE) Institute.

Continue readingHigh Food Prices: Despite Claims to the Contrary, US Farmers Are Still Doing Well
Published April 25, 2011

The Psychology of Food Riots

I missed this article by Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas in Foreign Affairs when it came out in January and discovered it last week while doing bibliographical research for a grant proposal.

Aside from the fact that Fraser and Rimas seem to confuse the effects of rising food prices and food price volatility, anyone with an interest in food policy should read it, as it nicely illustrates the fact that food prices alone are unlikely to trigger political unrest:

Continue readingThe Psychology of Food Riots