Skip to content

Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Published November 29, 2011

My Work on Food Prices Discussed in Sweden’s Axess Magasin

A study by Marc F. Bellemare (2011) studies the link between food prices and food-related protests and riots. The study uses the amount of news about food riots as a measure of how widespread protests are and relates these to monthly data on food prices. This creates a relatively short time periods (months rather than years), which increases the accuracy of the relationship. Indeed, if one studies the relationship betweenthe protests in the Middle East that began in January and February with annual data, one would have missed the fact that that they were preceded by very large price increases starting in the fall of 2010. To identify a causal relationship, the study uses natural disasters to explain variation in food prices. Interestingly, the results of this study show that rising food prices lead to increased risk of protests, but that the effect is reverse for food price volatility.

This is from an article in in Sweden’s Axess Magasin by Jesper Roine, of the Stockholm School of Economics.

The original article is in Swedish — the above excerpt is brought to you in part by Google Translate. From the Wiki page for Axess Magasin, I conclude that it’s Sweden’s equivalent of The Atlantic.

Published November 29, 2011

The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa

That’s the title of a new working paper by Stelious Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou:

We examine the long-run consequences of the scramble for Africa among European powers in the late 19th century and uncover the following empirical regularities. First, using information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization, we show that borders were arbitrarily drawn. Apart from the land mass and water area of an ethnicity’s historical homeland, no other geographic, ecological, historical, and ethnic-specific traits predict which ethnic groups have been partitioned by the national border. Second, using data on the location of civil conflicts after independence, we show that partitioned ethnic groups have suffered significantly more warfare; moreover, partitioned ethnicities have experienced more prolonged and more devastating civil wars. Third, we identify sizeable spillovers; civil conflict spreads from the homeland of partitioned ethnicities to nearby ethnic regions. These results are robust to a rich set of controls at a fine level and the inclusion of country fixed effects and ethnic-family fixed effects. The uncovered evidence thus identifies a sizable causal impact of the scramble for Africa on warfare.