Papers I liked at the Midwest International Economic Development Conference.

Last weekend I visited the fantastic city of Madison (which makes you feel that there is hope for such a thing as an ecologically sustainable city) for the 12th Midwest International Economic Development Conference.

This is a small but very specialized and well organized conference, which rotates every year between Madison and Minnesota. Gordon Hanson gave a thought provoking keynote talk about dynamic comparative advantages.  

I presented one of the papers using the Gambia networks data. Many papers called my attention, among them some deserve special mention:

Jason Fletcher reproduces the polemic hump-shape relationship between ethnic diversity and economic outcomes (Ashraf and Galor) using data from our host state in Genetic diversity and economic outcomes: Evidence from high schools in Wisconsin Another great paper by Jennifer Alix-Garcia about forest conservation in Mexico, It's Complicated: Direct vs. Incentive-based Land Conservation in Mexico Rossella Calvi  using a very nice historic data to test the Long-Term Effects of Access to Health Care: Medical Missions in Colonial India Johanna Fajardo-Gonzalez presented a paper about the effects of hipsterization of quinoa (which coauthor Marc Bellemare has blogged many times,) The Welfare Impacts of Rising Quinoa Prices: Evidence from Peru A couple of great papers about effects of education in Latin America: Juan Castro says “schools still matter” in The Contribution of School Influences and Early Childhood Environments to the Difference in Cognitive Development between Urban and Rural Children in Peru  and Pablo Pena showed an impresive linear relationship between birth day and within-class school performance in Mexico that is Creating winners and losers: Relative age in school and its impact on outcomes in childhood and adulthood

Papers using the Gambia Networks Data 2009

We are currently finishing the data cleaning of the second round of networks data collected in the Gambia in 2014, and we expect soon to have the first results. We will have a unique census panel dataset of several social and economic exchange networks in 56 villages and a large village-level RCT between the two waves... looking forward to show the results!

But many researchers, some outside the project's group, have used the baseline Gambia Networks Data 2009, creating a small literature around the data. Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to put all these papers together. This is the list so far:

Arcand, Jean-Louis and Dany Jaimovich (2014). "Does ethnic diversity decrease economic interactions? Evidence from exchange networks in rural Gambia." MPRA Working Papers No. 60497. 

Beck, Ulrik, Benedikte Bjerge, and Marcel Fafchamps (2015). "Social Ties and the Efficiency of Factor Markets." Manuscript, Stanford University. 

Beck, Ulrik and Benedikte Bjerge (2015). "Are inter-household land transactions pro-poor?" Paper prepared for presentation at the WORLD BANK CONFERENCE ON LAND AND POVERTY, Washington DC, March 23-27, 2015.

Jaimovich, Dany (2011). "Macrostructure and microstructure: Evidence from overlapping village networks in The Gambia." MPRA Working Papers No. 38932.

Jaimovich, Dany (2015). "Missing links, missing markets: Evidence of the transformation process in the economic networks of Gambian villages." World Development, 66, 645-664.

Tontarawongsa, Chutima (2013). "Network Structures and Public Good Provision: Evidence from village kinship networks in the Gambia." Job Market Paper, Department of Economics, Duke University.