A reminder that the economics department holiday party will be held on Friday, December 7, from 2:00-3:30 PM in 368A Heady Hall. The party is open to faculty, staff, and graduate students in the department. Hope to see everyone there!

William Edwards, professor of economics, was the coordinator for a recent ISU Extension and Outreach workshop entitled “Insuring Iowa’s Agriculture.”  In its 12th year, the annual workshop offers educational sessions for crop insurance agents and insurance company representatives. Chad Hart, grain Extension economist, was a presenter along with other ISU faculty.

Participants learned about the premium re-rating process, the trend adjustment option for proving yields, production records and reviews, the high risk alternative coverage endorsement, the implications of the farm bill, and corn and soybean practices following a drought. Edwards said he noticed that participants were particularly interested in some of the new insurance options available to crop producers.

There were 401 registrations, which is a record number for this workshop. Says Edwards, "The workshop drew increased interest this year due to the large number of claims being processed following the widespread drought."

Insuring Iowa's Agriculture is also supported by the Risk Management Agency (USDA) and the National Crop Insurance Services organization. It took place on November 5 at the Scheman Building in Ames.

Listen to the audio recording of Professor Peter Orazem's November 14th Dean's Lecture as he talked about improving educational outcomes in developing countries through health and nutrition interventions. Click on the "Download Audio" link to listen: http://www.lectures.iastate.edu/lecture/28205

"Certified to Migrate: Property Rights and Migration in Rural Mexico," with Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, University of Toronto. Thursday, December 6, 3:40 PM, 368A Heady Hall.

Marco Gonzalez-Navarro is an assistant professor at University of Toronto and a J-PAL affiliate. He obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and his B.A. from ITAM. Before taking up his position in Toronto, he was a Robert Wood Johnson scholar in health policy research at the University of California-Berkeley. His research interests are development economics, and his work has focused on infrastructure, crime, health and migration.

Abstract: Improving security of tenure over agricultural land has recently been the focus of a number of large land certification programs. While the main justification for these efforts was to increase productive investments and facilitate land rental transactions, we show that if access rights were tied to actual land use in the previous regime, these programs can also lead to increased outmigration from agrarian communities. We analyze the Mexican ejido land certification program which, from 1993 to 2006, awarded ownership certificates to 3.6 million farmers on about half the country’s agricultural land. Using the program rollout over time and space as an identification strategy, we show that households that obtained land certificates were 28% more likely to have a migrant member. The effect was larger for households with ex-ante weaker property rights and with larger off-farm opportunities. At the community level, certificates led to a 5% reduction in population, and the effects were larger in lower land quality environments. We show evidence of certificates leading to sorting, with larger farmers staying and land-poor farmers leaving in high productivity areas. We use satellite imagery to determine that, on average, cultivated land was not reduced because of the program, consistent with increases in agricultural labor productivity. Furthermore, in high productivity areas, the certification program led to an increase in cultivated land compared to low productivity ones. We confirm the validity of the results with checks on exogeneity of the rollout process relative to migration trends and on attrition in the panel dataset we use.

http://ncsungrant.sdstate.org/GrantsandFundingOpportunities.cfm

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