I recently presented a revised version of Niels-Hugo Blunch and my paper, "Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs," on the effects of participating in adult literacy programs in Ghana for the department and at the 2008 Pacific Development Conference held at UCSD. If you are interested in the preliminary results, please see the presentation. The PacDev is a great opportunity to present work and see what else is going on in the development field on the West Coast. This year, Mark Anderson, who is a 2nd year student at the department, presented his paper on crime in South Africa and received a lot of praise and good comments. The paper was originally written for my Econ 591 and Econ 543 classes. I will try to link to his paper when the next version is ready.

Craig McIntosh did a great job at putting together a very interesting conference with lots of good papers. Next year the conference will be in the San Francisco, arranged by Anoshua Chaudhuri (SFSU), who is a former graduate student at UW Economics. Since we will be going back to San Francisco there were discussions about whether the name should be changed back to the original name: the Bay Area Development Association (you figure out what the "appropriate" acronym would be ;-) ).