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Starting mid-October, I will be teaching the second half-semester course (what we call a “mini” at Minnesota) in our graduate Trade and Development sequence. Mine will be the first of three minis on core topics in development micro.

One of the assignments in my class has students write two referee reports on current working papers in the broad area of development microeconomics.

If you have one or more working papers on which you would like feedback before the end of the calendar year, I would be happy to consider them for the pool of current working papers my students will pick from.

I received the following email:

I wanted to reach out to you, in the hopes that you could provide me some advice as a student considering a future in graduate work in Agricultural Economics. Ever since I began my undergraduate coursework, I always knew that an MS in Agricultural Economics was a possible future for me. Now … I am swiftly coming to the conclusion that a graduate degree in this space could really help me achieve my career ambitions, as well as open more doors.

Do you have any advice for a student considering a future in this field? Do you have any recommendations for undergraduate students preparing to apply to graduate studies in Ag or Applied Econ?

This was my response:

The annual meetings of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association begin tomorrow night in Chicago, so before I fly to Midway, I thought it would be a good time to talk about the agricultural and applied economics profession as distinct from the economics profession, but also in terms of how it closely resembles economics.

To do so, I thought I should feature a recent Twitter thread by Beatrice Cherrier, a historian of economic thought at the University of Caen in Normandie who is currently looking at the history of agricultural and applied economics. I’ll post Beatrice’s tweets below, interspersed with some of my own comments.