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I’m an academic, which means that my summers are characterized by high expectations and low productivity.

Every spring, I make a list of all the research projects I want to work on during the summer. Inevitably, by the time September comes around, I have accomplished about half of what I had set out to do.

So it goes. Which is not to say that my summer was completely unproductive. Here is a list of things that I did spend time on this summer, in no particular order:

No, this is not a repost of this previous post of mine. Similar prize for sure, but different professional association. Whereas my previous post was about the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), this time, my coauthors and I have won the European Association of Agricultural Economists’ (EAAE) Quality of Research Discovery award for my paper titled “The Welfare Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia.”

As per the EAAE’s website, to win the Quality of Research Discovery award,

The research must be a significant contribution to the field of knowledge in any of the areas of agricultural economics. The work should demonstrate excellence in research and may deal with conceptual as well as empirical analysis of a relevant issue.

I’ve discussed our award-winning paper many times on this blog, but here is the abstract in case you are new here:

From a longer column by Pramit Bhattacharya published last week in Mint, one of India’s leading financial newspapers:

While many acknowledge the key role of dearer food in destabilizing regimes, right from the time of the French Revolution in the 18th century to the Arab Spring in 2011, there are only a few studies that have sought to study the links between food prices and social unrest empirically. In a recent research paper, the economist Marc Bellemare of the University of Minnesota attempts to fill that gap by establishing a causal link between rising food prices and social unrest. …

Bellemare collates monthly cross-country data on food riots between 1990 and 2011 to show that it is the level of food prices rather than the volatility in food prices that drives food riots across countries. …

In most democracies, policymakers are aware of the links between food inflation and political upheavals. But food policies designed to prevent price volatility can be very different from those designed to prevent food price increases. India is a case in point. As my colleague TCA Sharad Raghavan pointed out in a recent article, while India’s closed door policies have managed to limit volatility in food prices, they have led to an increase in food prices by preventing imports of cheaper food. Perhaps, it is time to embrace more openness and volatility, if it brings with it lower prices on average, and greater political stability.

You can read the whole thing here. Much to his credit, Pramit is the only person to have reported on this who has grasped (and clearly explained) the levels vs. volatility distinction. See the bolded part above for a great example that I wish I would have thought about when writing my paper, as it would have made my life much easier.

ht: Rajib Sutradhar.