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The Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will host the 12th Midwest International Economic Development Conference. The conference will be held on April 24-25, 2015, and will accept papers and organized sessions on all topics in economic development. Each presenter will have a 30-minute presentation slot, including a 5-minute commentary by an assigned discussant. Sessions will begin on the morning of April 24 and end at lunch on April 25. No more than three sessions will be held at the same time.

The keynote speaker will be Gordon Hanson, Pacific Economic Cooperation Chair in International Economic Relations at UC San Diego and director of the Center on Emerging and Pacific Economies. We invite you to submit a paper or session to present at the conference. The deadline for submission is January 9, 2015. For more information and to submit a paper, visit: http://www.aae.wisc.edu/mwiedc.

Dave Giles, whose Econometrics Beat is one of my favorite economics blogs, is not fond of what he calls the “cookbook” approach to econometrics:

I’ll lay it on the table – I am definitely not a fan of “Cookbook Econometrics.”

Here’s what I’m referring to.

It’s pointless, and frankly dangerous, to simply tell students what to do, without telling them why. And I know that this applies to more than just econometrics. When I’m explaining to students why we go through the proofs of important results, I usually make the following points.

First, depending on the nature and level of the course, I may or may not expect them to be able to reproduce the proof in a test or exam – usually, that’s the least of my concerns. Second, the real benefit in being led through the proof of a standard result in econometrics is that enables you to see exactly where (and how) any underlying assumptions are actually used.

When framed that way, it is certainly difficult to argue that students should be taught the cookbook approach to econometrics. But after teaching a half-semester “cookbook econometrics” course, I think it is considerably more nuanced than Dave explains it in the post quoted above (and in this other post of his).

From an article in The Atlantic:

The International Grains Council estimates that inventories of soy, wheat, barley, and corn are reaching their highest volume in 30 years. …

And what has caused this explosion in grain supplies? Prices. They’ve been unusually high in recent years and have encouraged farmers to pour money into boosting production. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, from 2005 to 2013 the land used to cultivate wheat, soy, and corn grew by 11 percent globally. Never before has such a large swath of the earth been tilled.

…

Today’s lower prices could discourage investment and reduce future production, ushering in another period of higher prices. This cycle is nothing new, but in recent years it has been shaped by new drivers (climate change, demographic change, volatile global economic conditions) that make the swings more frequent and the range of variation more extreme.

The problem with these developments is that greater food-related volatility will bring about social and geopolitical instability.

That giant sucking sound you just heard was caused by the eyeballs of a thousand agricultural economists rolling backward into their skulls.

Three things: