The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields,” played instrumentally by Andy Timmons:
The Andy Timmons Band’s newest CD, Andy Timmons Band Plays Sgt. Pepper, came out this Tuesday and is available here.
Published October 28, 2011
Marc F. Bellemare Posts
Published October 27, 2011
Conditional Cash Transfers and the Budget Share of Food
From a forthcoming paper by Attanasio et al. in the Economic Journal:
We study food Engel curves amongst the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer program in Colombia. After controlling for the endogeneity of total consumption and for the price variability across villages, our estimates imply that an increase in consumption by 10 percent would lead to a decrease of 1 percent in the share of food. However, quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of the program show that the share of food increases. This result is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that the program could increase the bargaining power of women, inducing a more than proportional increase in food consumption.
The Meaning of Hockey
I know it’s a little bit late for National Coming Out Day, but I have a coming out of my own to make.
I am Canadian, and I don’t like hockey.
I don’t dislike the sport. It just leaves me completely indifferent. In elementary school, I would remain silent while my friends would discuss the previous night’s game during our morning walk to school. In secondary school, the annual hockey module in our PE classes was always the least interesting to me. And since I moved to the US ten years ago, I must have left many a would-be acquaintance scrambling for new topics after I replied in the negative to their “You’re Canadian? You must like hockey!” or “You’re from Montreal? Patrick Roy, man…”
All of which really means that this article from by Stephen Marche in The Walrus — the closest thing to The New Yorker in my home and native land — deserves all the accolades it can get. Indeed, although I have no interest in its subject matter, I read it with considerable interest from beginning to end: