Category: Development
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Handbook Chapter on Agri-Food Value Chains in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Last month my esteemed co-authors, Marc Bellemare and Sunghun Lim, and I published a chapter on agri-food value chains within low- and middle-income countries in volume six of the Handbook of Agricultural Economics. It was both a huge honor and a huge undertaking to write this chapter about such a rich and important literature. A…
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“The Coronavirus Pandemic and Food Security: Evidence from Mali”—Forthcoming
My paper, co-authored with Guigonan Serge Adjognon and Aly Sanoh, on changes in experienced food security associated with the coronavirus pandemic is now forthcoming at Food Policy. In the paper, we combine pre-pandemic survey data with follow-up phone survey data from Mali, and find some interesting—and perhaps surprising—patterns in experienced food security within Mali. Here…
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Higher Aspirations, Less Investment? Some New Experimental Evidence
New research by David McKenzie, Aakash Mohpal, and Dean Yang finds that exogenously increased financial aspirations lead to less borrowing and business investments two years later. This finding is consistent with existing evidence, using observational data, of an inverted U-shaped relationship between the aspirations gap and ‘future oriented’ behavior such as investments (by me), education…
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“Aspirations and Investments in Rural Myanmar”—Forthcoming
In 2014, while I was completing my M.S. degree at MSU, I worked as a research assistant on a data collection project in Mon State Myanmar. As part of this work, I designed a module to be included in a larger household survey that aimed to measure the hopes and aspirations of respondents. That initial…
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COVID-19 and Trends in Conflict Globally
I am happy to announce that a short research note titled “COVID-19 and Conflict,” co-authored with Colette Salemi, is now out in World Development. It is a modest study, but one that we hope will inspire and motivate future research relating to pandemic-related disruptions and inter-group conflict. Here are some highlights:
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The Coronavirus Pandemic and Food Security – New Working Paper
The coronavirus pandemic continues to spread across the world. We all know this, and live it every single day. One of the many questions swirling around the pandemic is what are the consequences of the pandemic on outcomes other than case counts and mortality?
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Does covid-19 raise the risk of violent conflict?
In a short article on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage Blog, my colleague Colette Salemi writes about our research on trends in conflict events and the coronavirus pandemic around the world. Basically, we really lack sufficient evidence to make credible claims about the relationship between the pandemic and violent conflict and simple time-series analysis highlights…
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“The Other Way COVID Will Kill: Hunger”
That is the title of a recent New York Times article, by Peter S. Goodman, Abdi Latif Dahir, and Karan Deep Singh, on how complications driven by the spread of the coronavirus has led to increased challenges for many people in accessing nutritious and healthy food. The article is a tour de force—reporting from Afghanistan, South Africa, India, South…
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The impact of maternal health on child health
A cool paper on the impact of maternal health on child health, by Leah Bevis and Kira Villa, is now forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources. I’ve had the opportunity to see this paper presented by both Leah and Kira at multiple conferences over the last few years. It really is excellent work by…
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Export Crops and Extra Conflict
I recently stumbled upon this new(ish) paper, by Benjamin Crost and Joseph Felter published in the June 2020 issue of the Journal of the European Economic Association. This paper shows a plausibly causal link between the export value of agricultural products (e.g. bananas in this case) and violent civil conflict. This is an important and…
Jeffrey R. Bloem 