Category: Uncategorized

I wrote my first post for this blog on December 31, 2010. In many ways, it is hard for me to believe that it has been three years; when I started out, I wasn’t sure I would manage to blog for more than three months!

It has been a great year for me, both offline and online. Offline, I was offered what was essentially my dream job in a department where I am surrounded by great colleagues and where there are many graduate students interested in my research areas. To top it all off, this great job had me relocate to the Upper Midwest, a part of the country that is much more to my liking, and the Twin Cities, a large metropolitan area that suits me much better.

Online, although my blogging has been lighter during the busier parts of the year (e.g., in July when we moved and took a three-day roadtrip from North Carolina to Minnesota along with our two dogs, and in December when the fall semester came to and end), this has been a good year for this blog, with 86,833 pageviews (241 pageviews per day) coming from 44,694 unique visitors.

In terms of pageviews, that’s almost a 20 percent increase from last 2012. But bear in mind that in September 2012 alone, I had upward of 23,000 page views because of Greg Mankiw linking to my post on the trading game! Without that outlier month, 2012 would have had much fewer pageviews, and this year would look relatively much better.

In 2013, the five posts that got the most pageviews were:

1. Quinoa Nonsense, or Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists
2. A Rant on Estimation with Binary Dependent Variables (Technical)
3. The Trading Game: An Easy to Run In-Class Experiment, breaking the top five for a second year in a row
4. The Inverse Farm Size–Productivity Relationship: “Proof” that Smallholders Can Feed the World?
5. “I’m Bad at Math”: My Story.

In 2014, I will likely blog a bit less, but my goal is to have at least one substantial, more serious post per week, typically on Monday.

Whether you’re a brand new reader or you’ve been reading this blog since early 2011, thank you very much for reading. Happy New Year!

* Sorry, still can’t bring myself to use the term “blogiversary.”

(Note: I will not be posting new material until the week of January 6. I will be spending all of next week with friends and family celebrating Christmas and the New Year, and the following week I will be at ASSA meetings interviewing job-market candidates as part of my department’s search in environmental and resource economics. Given the foregoing, I thought this would be a good time to repost part 2 of my advice to job-market candidates.)

It’s that time of the year again, when graduate students who are about to enter their final year in economics and related disciplines are getting ready to go on the job market.

Going on the job market is a harrowing experience for most people, however, so I thought I should help job-market candidates by sharing my advice.

This post is the second in a series of three. Today, I’d like to discuss what it’s like to interview at the annual meetings, and how you should prepare for it. The next installment will cover on-campus interviews.

That’s the title of a nice new article in World Development by Henrik Hansen and Neda Trifkovic, both from the University of Copenhagen. Click here for an ungated version.

Here is the abstract:

We estimate the causal effect of food standards on Vietnamese pangasius farmers’ well-being measured by per capita consumption expenditure. We estimate both the average effects and the local average treatment effects on poorer and richer farmers by instrumental variable quantile regression. Our results indicate that large returns can be accrued from food standards, but only for the upper middle-class farmers, i.e., those between the 50% and 85% quantiles of the expenditure distribution. Overall, our result points to an exclusionary impact of standards for the poorest farmers while the richest do not apply standards because the added gain is too small.

The emphasis is mine. If you are like me, your first inclination (after pausing to appreciate the fact that the authors identify a causal effect) was to look up “pangasius” on Wikipedia; here is the entry.

I should note that by “food standards,” what the authors mean here is both quality and safety standards, which are often requested by importing countries. See here for related work of my own, in which I look at the impact of enforcement in the context of contract farming whose output is exported.

As an added bonus, Neda Trifkovic is on Twitter. You can follow her here if you have an interest in food policy in developing countries.