Category: Uncategorized

It’s that time of the year again, when graduate students who are in their final year are getting ready to go on the job market. Because going on the job market is a harrowing experience for most people, I thought I should help job-market candidates by sharing my advice.

This post is the last in a series of three. Today, I’d like to discuss what it’s like to interview on campus (also known as a flyout), and how you should prepare for it.

(I have been meaning to write a blog post about this for some time, but it took a very long time for both the articles involved to get published.)

I have blogged a number of times about my 2013 article with Chris Barrett and David Just titled “The Welfare Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility” (see here, here, here, here, and here). About a year ago, Linden McBride, a friend of mine who is currently doing her PhD in applied economics at Cornell (where she is doing some really cool work on policy targeting using random forest algorithms, and where she serves on the editorial team at econthatmatters.com), got in touch regarding a comment she had written on our work.

In her comment, Linden highlights how changing one of the assumptions we make in our 2013 article changes our core qualitative finding. Here is her abstract:

Another day, another media story in which I weigh in on some food policy-relevant story: I was quoted last week in an article in US News & World Report about the potential link between Chipotle’s focus on “sustainable” (i.e., local, non-GMO) procurement practices and the nine-state E. coli outbreak  linked to food from the same chain fast-food chain, and which has made 52 people sick.

I discussed for a while with journalist Kimberly Leonard, who wanted to know about my own work on a similar relationship, viz. the statistical relationship my coauthors and I have found between farmers markets and food-borne illness: