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Month: March 2012

Published March 19, 2012

Slides of My Keynote Lecture at Last Weekend’s “Economics and Management of Risk in Agriculture and Natural Resources” Conference

I was trained as an agricultural and applied economist, so I have spent a lot of time doing research on risk as it relates to agriculture and development (see here and here for published articles).

Because of this, I have been involved with the annual Economics and Management of Risk in Agriculture and Natural Resources conference for the past few years.

I first presented at that conference in 2009, and since I had then volunteered to organize the conference, I was in charge of the conference program in 2010 and of logistics in 2011.

This year, I was asked to give the keynote lecture, in which I chose to discuss what the “credibility revolution” that took place in economics over the past ten years or so — which has lead to economists to adopting stricter standards of evidence and of statistical identification — means for agricultural and applied economics as a field.

In case you have an interest in this topic, I am making the slides of my keynote lecture are available. I think the content of those slides is especially relevant for current graduate students of agricultural and applied economics.

The Economics and Management of Risk in Agriculture and Natural Resources conference is usually held somewhere on the Gulf Coast. This year, it was held in Pensacola, FL. I took the picture on top of this post while walking along the beach early Saturday morning.

Published March 15, 2012

Experiments in Political Science

Two interesting articles were published within a few days of one another last week on the topic of experimental methods in political science.

The first article is by Jasjeet S. Sekhon and Rocio Titiunik in the American Political Science Review, and it discusses the uses and misuses of natural experiments:

Natural experiments help to overcome some of the obstacles researchers face when making causal inferences in the social sciences. However, even when natural interventions are randomly assigned, some of the treatment–control comparisons made available by natural experiments may not be valid. We offer a framework for clarifying the issues involved, which are subtle and often overlooked. We illustrate our framework by examining four different natural experiments used in the literature. In each case, random assignment of the intervention is not sufficient to provide an unbiased estimate of the causal effect. Additional assumptions are required that are problematic. For some examples, we propose alternative research designs that avoid these conceptual difficulties.

In other words, many of the natural experiments found in the literature do not allow identifying causal effects, and the authors do a good job of providing examples of four published natural experiments whose findings they question. The findings in Sekhon and Titiunik’s article apply to some regression discontinuity designs as well.

Continue readingExperiments in Political Science
Published March 14, 2012

Eugen Weber and the Western Tradition in 26 Hours

In college, I declared economics as my major before doing a Masters in economics and a PhD in applied economics. Having been trained as an economist through-and-through, I am thus woefully ignorant of what the humanities and other social sciences have had to say about development policy.

While I did read outside of economics during my minor in philosophy, my philosophical readings were largely confined to political philosophy and epistemology — two topics that are of direct relevance to economics.

In recent years, however, I have decided to remedy my ignorance by reading classic social sciences books surrounding development policy. I was thus very happy when Chris Blattman posted his list of books development economists should read but usually don’t.

I have so far read six of the titles on Chris’ list. All were very enlightening. Perhaps more importantly, all contributed in some way to my research and teaching.

One of my favorite books on the list was Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen, which is an account of how France modernized between 1870 and the end of World War I. It has also become my favorite nonfiction book. When I realized that Weber had been teaching at UCLA, I imagined how interesting it must have been to take a class with him.

I no longer need to imagine it. A student in my principles of micro class, who noticed the book on my desk when she visited during my office hours, brought to my attention this series of video lectures on the Western tradition, taught by Weber himself. There are 52 lectures, each lasting 30 minutes. Watching these lectures should be a very nice way to spend my next 26 hours of spare time.

(HT: Haoxiaohan Cai.)