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Category: Self-Promotion

Published December 15, 2011

Nice Words from a Student

And a current class, a graduate-level course on the microeconomics of international development policy, especially appeals to her because of its real-world applications. “It’s about the way policies are implemented in places like Africa and about how to implement policies more efficiently,” she explains. “Once you can apply it, it’s pretty cool.”

From a profile of Allison Vernerey, center for the Duke women’s basketball team, in the November-December 2011 issue of Duke Magazine. Here is Allison’s player profile on GoDuke.com.

I will let the reader guess who teaches that course she is talking about…

Published December 7, 2011

How Do the Level and Volatility of Food Prices Shape Social Unrest?

On Monday, I gave a Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar (MADS) at the Center for Global Development (CGD). According to the CGD website:

The MADS is a ten year-old research seminar series that brings some of the world’s leading development scholars to discuss their new research and ideas. The presentations meet an academic standard of quality and are at times technical, but retain a focus on a mixed audience of researchers and policymakers.

The title of my talk was “Food Prices and Riots: Estimating How the Level and Volatility of Food Prices Shape Social Unrest in the Developing world, 1990-2011.” I presented results from this paper, which I have often talked about on this blog. The slides for my talk are available here.

One of the interesting things about presenting in the MADS series is that you get a discussant. My discussant was my friend and colleague Ed Carr, who is an associate professor of geography at the University of South Carolina and who is currently on leave at the US Agency for International Development.

It was very nice to get Ed’s very insightful comments given how much work he has done on agricultural development and on the environment (he discusses a lot of his work in his recent book, Delivering Development). And given his expertise on climate change, Ed was the ideal person to discuss my paper, given my use of natural disasters to identify the causal relationship flowing from food prices to social unrest.

Published November 29, 2011

My Work on Food Prices Discussed in Sweden’s Axess Magasin

A study by Marc F. Bellemare (2011) studies the link between food prices and food-related protests and riots. The study uses the amount of news about food riots as a measure of how widespread protests are and relates these to monthly data on food prices. This creates a relatively short time periods (months rather than years), which increases the accuracy of the relationship. Indeed, if one studies the relationship betweenthe protests in the Middle East that began in January and February with annual data, one would have missed the fact that that they were preceded by very large price increases starting in the fall of 2010. To identify a causal relationship, the study uses natural disasters to explain variation in food prices. Interestingly, the results of this study show that rising food prices lead to increased risk of protests, but that the effect is reverse for food price volatility.

This is from an article in in Sweden’s Axess Magasin by Jesper Roine, of the Stockholm School of Economics.

The original article is in Swedish — the above excerpt is brought to you in part by Google Translate. From the Wiki page for Axess Magasin, I conclude that it’s Sweden’s equivalent of The Atlantic.