Category: Uncategorized

(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.

Natalia P. Hule, who writes about agriculture and development in India, had a great post a few weeks ago titled “My Tryst with Organic Farming,” in which she discussed how she tried to implement organic sugarcane farming in Tamil Nadu Mandla, Madhya Pradesh as part of her work.

Natalia begins her story as follows:

When I was working in Mandla, I was keen upon the introduction of organic sugarcane production as many farmers near the town of Mandla have access to irrigation. The town is practically surrounded on 3 sides by the Narmada. I went about this in a thorough fashion and chose to do what is recommended by the Tamil Nadu Agriculture University for organic sugarcane production. Below is a description of how reality smacked me straight in the face.