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Category: Self-Promotion

Published July 3, 2013

Yours Truly in the Pacific Standard

Nobody likes America’s agricultural policy. Not conservatives, not liberals, and not policy experts, who frequently use terms like “astonishingly irrational” to describe our system of federal subsidies for farming. So why is everyone so angry and shocked that last week’s laden farm bill—comprised of addendums to the same legislative package that Congress has been tagging since 1938—failed in the House of Representatives? Some reports describe a Farm Lobby Goliath smited by a tiny contingent of conservative House GOPers who are hellbent on shrinking the size of government no matter the objections of their fellow Republicans from farm country. But according to a new working paper by Duke economic policy researchers Marc Bellemare and Nick Carnes, it might not have been the all-powerful farm lobby that the House GOP subverted so much as a small contingent of American voters.

From an article by Michael Fitzgerald discussing my most recent working paper in the Pacific Standard, formerly known as Miller-McCune Magazine.

That said, although we find that electoral incentives seem to be the most consistent driver of congressional voting behavior on matters of agricultural protection, we still find evidence that lobbying (via the amount of contributions members of Congress receive from agricultural political action committees) and legislator preferences (via how much of their pre-Congress career the same members of Congress have spent working in agriculture) matter.

Published April 3, 2013

The Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility in Ethiopia

How does commodity price volatility affect the welfare of rural households in developing countries, for whom hedging and consumption smoothing are often difficult? And when governments choose to intervene in order to stabilize commodity prices, as they often do, who gains the most? This article develops an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to answer those questions, along with illustrative empirical results based on panel data from rural Ethiopian households. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility are increasing in household income, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.

That’s the abstract of an article Chris Barrett, David Just, and I have been working on since 2007, and which has just been accepted for publication by the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

In this article, we ask the question: What is the effect on rural households of increasing the uncertainty (i.e., volatility) surrounding the prices of the staple crops they produce and consume, holding the levels of those same prices constant? In other words, we isolate the impact of an increase in the variance of a price distribution holding the mean of that price distribution constant, and we look at the effects of the covariance between each pair of prices, since a price never varies alone.

To answer those questions, we use publicly available survey data from rural Ethiopia and study the welfare impacts of volatility in the prices of coffee, maize, beans, barley, wheat, teff, and sorghum.

This article, I think, is my best piece of research so far, and it is not without reason that I used it as my job-market paper this year. It really has everything one wants one’s research articles to have:

Continue readingThe Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility in Ethiopia
Published March 27, 2013

On the DFAIT–CIDA Merger

CIDA

As part of its 2013 budget, the Harper government has decided to fold the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) into the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).

It is not uncommon for a developed country to have its development agency depend directly on its ministry of foreign affairs. In the United States, for example, the US Agency for International Development depends on the State Department. In France, the Agence française de développement depends on the Quai d’Orsay.

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Many in Canada were up in arms about the DFAIT–CIDA merger. I suspect that reactions would have been very different had this merger taken place under a different (i.e., not Conservative) government: the Zeitgeist in Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia is that nothing the Harper government does is ever right. (This isn’t to say I support the Harper government; those who know me well also know that I have spent two summers working for a Liberal cabinet minister when I was in college.)

I was given the chance to express my view on the merger in a Toronto Star article by Rick Westhead:

“We wish foreign aid was altruistic, but it’s always been an expression of foreign policy,” said David Morley, president of UNICEF’s Canadian operations. “Sometimes you felt the two (CIDA and Foreign Affairs) were going off into different worlds. This could be good, getting the aid portfolio closer to power.”

“Canada doesn’t do aid out of generosity or good nature,” said Marc Bellemare, a Quebec native and assistant economics professor at Duke University who studies development assistance. “Aid has always been tied to foreign policy. This is more transparent. At least we’re being more open about what it is.”

The story features the views of many other people, who have much smarter things to say than I do about the whole thing. Owen Barder, for example, notes that having development assistance and international trade be part of the same organization may well help Canada have a more consistent stance toward developing-country agriculture, given that most agricultural imports to Canada are slapped with a 19 percent tariff.

Owen also had an op-ed on the topic in The Globe and Mail in which he argues that Canadian development is more than just CIDA.