News
The annual conference on 9-10 June 2022 hosted by the University of Hohenheim brought together international scholars and researchers of development economics and neighboring fields. Plenary sessions with keynote speakers, parallel sessions with contributed papers, and poster sessions reflected the current state of research in development economics and provided a forum for exchange for researchers and practitioners. The conference took place as a physical meeting.
Keynote Speakers
Christopher B. Barrett (Cornell University)
Christopher Udry (Northwestern University)
Local Organizers
Regina Birner and Manfred Zeller (University of Hohenheim).
Selection Committee
Axel Dreher (Heidelberg University), Andreas Fuchs (University of Göttingen), Michael Grimm (University of Passau), Isabel Günther (ETH Zürich), Krisztina Kis-Katos (University of Göttingen) and Matthias Schündeln (Goethe University Frankfurt).
Program
An overview of the program is available on the conference’s page.
Please find the full program (including details on sessions, presenters, rooms and links to papers) here.
Do you ask yourself where our discipline is heading? In a special issue of the Review of Development Economics, we want to debate the current trends and the future directions in development economics. This is an open call for submissions on research methods, ethics and finance. The co-editors are Anke Hoeffler and Reetika Khera.
Link to the call: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/14679361.
More information can be found here.
Research of Members
While illicit capital flight is a major concern of policymakers in developing countries, there is only little research on the possible link between capital flight and development aid. In this paper, we address the issue for Nepal, a stereotypical financially closed developing economy that is highly dependent on resources from abroad. Distinguishing features of our approach are the use of a narrowly defined proxy of capital flight, based on trade cost-adjusted mirror trade statistics, and the focus on the foreign-exchange cash component of development aid. We document a robust partial correlation between aid and outward capital flight that is economically and statistically significant. Interestingly, this positive correlation is not observable for remittances, an alternative form of foreign-exchange inflows where the capital flight motivation is absent. Furthermore, it is visible in the FX cash component but not in broader aid definitions that include in-kind transfers, or in multilateral and IMF loans. Finally, when comparing the subcomponents of export underinvoicing and import overinvoicing, only the latter is driving our results.
Almost half of the world's states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article introduces a new dataset on aid giving that covers all countries in the world, both rich and poor, and explores the determinants of aid donorship. It argues and shows empirically that democratic institutions support the setup of an aid program in richer countries but undermine its establishment in poorer countries. The findings hold in instrumental-variable regressions and the pattern is similar for the amount of aid.
Vacancies
In a joint appointment with the RWI – Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, the Faculty of Economics at Ruhr University Bochum is seeking to fill a W2 professorship in „Empirical Development Economics“ with a microeconomic orientation. The position will be tenured as civil servant („Jülich Model“).
The main focus of the position will be at RWI’s newly established Policy Lab „Climate Change, Development and Migration“. The Policy Lab conducts research on environmental policy, labor markets and migration in the Global South as well as on the economics of migration in the Global North and seeks to improve the effectiveness of pro-poor climate, development, and migration policies. Within the Policy Lab, the professorship will contribute in particular to the development of the research area on migration in the Global South.
Applications can be submitted until June 22nd, 2022.
For more information, please see the full vacancy.
The project „DecLaRe“ is seeking to employ nine West African PhD candidates for four years.
DecLaRe aims to identify recommendation domains for scalable innovations towards sustainable crop production and animal husbandry in West Africa, focusing on northern Benin and Ghana. The PhD candidates will be affiliated to one of the three West African DecLaRe partners – University for Development Studies (UDS, Ghana), University of Parakou (UP, Benin), and the West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL, Burkina Faso) – and will be supervised by a tandem of West African and German faculty. The partner universities in Germany (University of Kassel, University of Göttingen, University of Hohenheim, PIK) will provide candidates with the opportunity to pursue a PhD degree.
The submission of applications is possible until June 28th, 2022.
For further details on the fellowships, please see the vacancy.
Event Information
The Thailand-Vietnam Socio-Economic Panel (TVSEP) Team invites submissions to the international conference on “Shocks and resilience in rural Southeast Asia” to be held in Göttingen (as a hybrid event) on May 23rd and 24th, 2022.
The submission deadline is January 31st, 2022 (midnight CET).
For further information on the event and the Call for Papers, please click here.
The Research Conference on „Sustainability in Global Value Chains“, jointly organized by The Research Network Sustainable Global Supply Chains and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), will take place on 7 December 2021 and is part of the Forum on Globalization and Industrialization (FGI 2021) held on 6 December 2021. It aims to bring together empirical research on sustainability topics in global value chains.
The organizers welcome submissions of full-length papers using micro and macro analyses, as well as quantitative and qualitative approaches. Interested applicants can submit the extended abstract by 31 May 2021 and the paper by 30 July 2021.
Further details on the conference as well as on the submission of papers can be found here.