PacDev 2014
I finished spring break with the PacDev (Pacific Conference for Development Economics) at UCLA on Saturday. My favorite two papers were " The Political Legacies Of Combat: Attitudes Towards War And Peace Among Israeli Ex-Combatants " by Grossman, Manekin, and Miodownik, and " The Causal Effect of Environmental Catastrophe on Long-Run Economic Growth " by Hsiang and Jina, which show that combat exposure causes Israeli soldiers to be anti-reconciliation with Palestine and more prejudiced against Palestinians, and typhoons are responsible for a crap-ton (that's the scientific term) of long-term GDP loss. The latter is maybe not surprising to the lay person, but this seems like a pretty strong paper in the "geography" column in the geography vs. institutions debate. I haven't read the papers yet, but the identification methods of instrumental variables in the first paper and panel data and fixed effects in the second seemed reasonable in the short pre...