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Category: Self-Promotion

Published February 6, 2012

Vote for the Best Aid Blogs of 2011

This blog has been nominated in a few categories in the annual Aid Bloggers Best Awards (ABBAs) organized by Tom Murphy over at A View from the Cave.

I am not making any money off of writing this blog — in fact, it actually costs a few hundred dollars every year to operate — which is why it is quite an honor to get nominated, and it’s an even bigger honor to be nominated in this many categories. If you like my writing, I encourage you to vote for this blog by clicking here.

Disclaimer: The above video is included as a bit of levity and should not be interpreted as a death threat, implicit or explicit, under any circumstance.

Published January 17, 2012

Aid Bloggers’ Best Awards

Tom Murphy, who runs A View from the Cave and is one of the partners running the Development and Aid Workers News Service (DAWNS) Digest — which delivers daily news relevant to development straight your inbox every morning for a very small fee — has opened up nominations for the 2011 Aid Bloggers’ Best Awards (ABBAs).

You can vote here. In case you would like to nominate one of my posts for best post of 2011, my top posts since I started the blog in 2011 (which makes this blog eligible for best new blog) were:

  1. Methodological Convergence in the Social Sciences, in which I discussed the increasingly porous boundaries between disciplines in the social sciences.
  2. Seven Billion People on Earth: Enough with the Fear Mongering, in which I expressed a great deal of skepticism at neo-Malthusian ideas, and which was linked to by Andrew Sullivan.
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