Population Association of America

At the Population Association of America's Annual Meeting in New Orleans I presented a preliminary version of my paper, "Hurricanes, Hoarding and Replacement: Estimating the Causal Effect of Mortality on Fertility," on the effect of mortality on fertility using exposure to hurricanes to identify exogenous changes in mortality. The presentation can be found here. I also discussed four papers in the session on "Infant and Child Mortality".

Pacific Development Conference

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 ;-) ).

ASSA meetings

I presented my paper "Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education" at the AEA annual meeting in New Orleans and discussed a paper (Siwan Anderson and Mukesh Eswaran, "What Determines Female Autonomy? Evidence from Bangladesh"). My presentation is here if you are interested.

HIV, Household Behaviour and Economic Development

I presented at the Labour and Development brown bag today. The topic was a grant proposal that I am trying to put together in cooperation with University of Witwatersrand and people here at UW. You can find the slides for the presentation here

Sometimes it *is* just that easy...

I always tell my students not to "over-think" what they do, especially when it comes to exams. Well, sometimes it is not easy to take your own advice. When the students return assignments I get them zipped from Catalyst's "Collect It" with each student's paper in a separate directory named after their UW NetID (which most of the times seems to have little or no relation to their actual name). The problem is that I need to print out all those papers. The "easy" way if of course to open each file individually in OpenOffice and then print (all my computers run Ubuntu, so no MS products here). With almost 40 students that can take a while even if done via the command line. It does not make it any easier that some of them submit pdf files, so I need to open Evince for those (I actually prefer these but that is another story).

Always wanting to be efficient I have been looking for a way to automate the printing process. After a fair bit of searching it seemed like my only option was to write a shell script and get around the problem that way. Now, I do not mind doing that (I am a geek, what can I say), but those things take time to put together, especially since what I was contemplating was writing something that searched through each sub-directory for the relevant file. Well, it turns out that the answer to my question was two very simple lines:

$ oowriter -p */*.doc $ lp */*.pdf

Doh!! That took me about an hour to figure out, but at least I will get the printing done in 2 minutes in the future instead of the more than 30 minutes I used to spend on it ;-).

Now, if I could only find a program that would also grade the papers that would be cool...

Vaccine and Economic Nonsense

Todays' NYT has an article about malaria vaccine trails in Africa which is showing some promise. In there there is a quote:

No decision has been made about the price to be offered to poor countries and international health agencies. But “if a child will benefit, price will not stand in the way,” said Dr. Christian Loucq, director of the vaccine initiative.

Obviously, if that was the case the price would be set so that Glaxo would make zero profit from the vaccine and that is unlikely to happen. This is an variation of the argument that if just one life can be saved by during something it is worth essentially unlimited resources, which is clearly false. This is why the Copenhagen Consensus was introduced.

Seeds and Africa

Interesting article from NYT about HYV (High Yielding Varieties) seeds in Africa and the problems of getting them out to the farmers.

Gone With the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education

I have just finished a paper on the relation between risk, fertility and education that uses data on hurricanes in Guatemala. The abstract is below. You can download the paper here.

This paper uses data on hurricanes in Guatemala over the last 120 years combined with a recent household survey to analyse how decisions on education and fertility respond to hurricane risk and shocks. For households with land an increase in the risk of hurricanes lead to both higher fertility and higher education, while households without land have fewer children but also higher education. Hurricane shocks lead to decreases in both fertility and education, and although there is a substantial compensatory effect on fertility later in life, that is not the case for education. The paper examines a number of possible explanations for these patterns and finds that the most likely explanation is insurance considerations through increased available labour and migration.

The Washington Monthly College Rankings

This might interest those of you who think that the "standard" rankings of universities leaves something to be desired. The Washington Monthly has just published their second ranking of universities and UW ranks 15 among the national universities (for comparison Harvard is 28!). The following is a quote from the article:

"What are reasonable indicators of how much a school is benefiting the country? We came up with three: how well it performs as an engine of social mobility (ideally helping the poor to get rich rather than the very rich to get very, very rich), how well it does in fostering scientific and humanistic research, and how well it promotes an ethic of service to country. We then devised a way to measure and quantify these criteria (See "A Note on Methodology"). Finally, we placed the schools into rankings. Rankings, we admit, are never perfect, but they're also indispensable."

You can find the rankings here and the complete guide with a link to the methodology here. For those of you who would like a digested version of the methodology the guide led to this article in the Washington Post.

Enjoy!

Malaria and the development of new inexpensive medicine

The Times (the real one) has an article about a potential cheap and effective treatment for malaria that could be available within a decade after scientists genetically engineered a form of yeast to make the key ingredient of the drug best able to fight the disease.

Sex selection, jail time and the import of brides

There are a couple of interesting recent article on the BBC News website relating to sex selective abortion and changes in India. The first is about a doctor and his assistant who have been sentenced to two years in jail for revealing the sex of a female foetus and then agreeing to abort it. This is the first time this has happend in India since a law was introduced in 1994 banning the practice.

The second is about what is supposedly the increased import of bride to the state of Haryana, which is one of the states in India with the most unequal sex ratio.

A summary of March

I never got around to writing the things up as they happend, so instead here is what went on in March of various research related activities: I presented my paper, "Gone with the Wind? Hurricane Risk, Fertility and Education", at the Pacific Conference for Development Economics held at Santa Clara University, at the Center for Sudies in Demography and Ecology seminar series and at the Population Association of America's (PAA) annual conference in Los Angeles in the session "Demography of Poverty". At the Population Association of America conference I also discussed two papers in the session "Causal Effects of Schooling on Demographic and Health Outcomes".

I also travelled to Delhi in connection with my project on the use of sex selective abortion in India. The project is partly financed by the University of Washington's Royalty Research Fund. Finally, I participated in a one day workshop on population issues in Ethiopia organised by the World Bank in Addis Ababa, where I presented preliminary results from a project analysing the effectiveness of family planning programs in Ethiopia.

Podcast on Microfinance

PRI's The World did a technology podcast about new ways of connecting developed countries small lenders with developing countries small borrows. You can listen here. Unfortunately, the links mentioned in the podcast are no longer available on their home page, but if you listen carefully enough you should be able to write them down yourself.

Richard Akresh Seminar - Friday 3 March

Richard Akresh from Illinios will be giving a seminar Friday 3 March. His main research area is development economics and he has worked on areas like child fostering, health and civil war. The title of the paper is "School Enrollment Impacts of Non-traditional Household Structure". The abstract is below:

Children growing up away from their biological parents may experience lower human capital investment. This paper measures the impact of child fostering on school enrollment using fixed effects regressions to address the endogeneity of fostering. Data collection by the author involved tracking and interviewing the sending and receiving household participating in each fostering exchange, allowing a comparison of foster children with their non-fostered biological siblings. Young foster children are 17.5 and 17.9 percent more likely to be enrolled after fostering than their host and biological siblings, respectively. This schooling improvement translates into a long-run improvement in educational and occupational attainment.

The Problems with Goats...

British Oxfam (one of the leading development NGOs) have a web site, Oxfam Unwrapped, where people can buy gifts that then goes to developing countries. According to the Times (the real one) the surprise hit of the Christmas shopping season was the goat, which costs GPD 24. From the "product description":

No if's or butts a goat is a great gift. Even the kids can get involved. You start with one and end up with a herd. They can then be sold to raise cash for school fees, or tools and start to reduce poverty. Best of all, the first female kid is given to another family and the process starts all over again. So why not invest in a goat?

Well, nothing is so good that it is not bad for something (normally the other way around I believe), so promtly The World Land Trust (WLT), also from the UK, have complained that the animals (you can also get a camel, calf or donkey) will have a “devastating environmental impact”. You can read more here.

PS Notice that the product decision specificly mentions kids. Next, someone will complaing that Oxfam is encouraging child labour!