Dev II - Development Seminar

Fall 2024

• Go first to the Reading Schedule for links to each week’s readings. and to the Syllabus with a longer list of related readings.

• Posted below are links to slides for each class (also at Reading Schedule)

Slides, notebooks, etc

• Week 1: Introduction

  • class slides

  • notebook on Lucas (1990)

• Week 2: Income and Productivity Gaps

  • class slides

  • notebook on Vollrath (2009)

  • notebook on Efficiency in Production

• Week 3: Structural Transformation

  • class slides

  • slides for Galor et al (2009) “Inequality … Human Capital…” by Thomas.

  • slides for Herrendorf et al (2013) “Growth and Structural Transformation.” by Sidie.

  • notebooks on Specific Factors Model, Structural Transformation, and Harris Todaro Migration.

• Week 4: Institutions, Political Economy, and Persistence

  • class slides

  • slides for Dell (2010) “The Persistent Effects of Peru’s Mining Mita.” by Jesus.

  • slides for Binswanger et al (1996) “Power, Distortions, Revolt…” by Mohamed.

  • notebooks on Coase, geospatial analysis, and RD designs.

• Week 5: Property Rights Farm Size Distribution, and Misallocation

  • class slides

  • slides for Chen (2017) “Untitled Land …” by Yuhao.

  • slides for Baker & Conning (2024) “A model of Enclosures…”

• Week 6: Property Rights and Intra-Household allocation

  • Farm Household models notebook.

  • slides for Udry (1996) “Gender… and the theory of the Household.” by Sadia.

• Week 7: Consumption Smoothing and Behavioral Finance

  • class slides

  • slides for Basu (2011) by Arturo

• Week 8: Political Decentralization, Governance, and Capture

  • class slides

  • notebook on intermediaries and corruption

  • slides for Balan et al by Ebrahim

• Week 9: State Origins, Capacity, and Coercion

  • class slides

  • slides by Marian

• Week 10: Public Goods, Access, Capabilities, and Change

  • slides for Banerjee

  • slides on Banerjee and Somanathan by Tanmay

• Week 11: Manufacturing and industrial policy

  • (slides on Hsieh and Klenow by Zhenye

  • my related slides

  • short slides on ISI

• Week 12: Services and development; course recap

  • slides on services

  • Practice Field Exam

• Week 13 & 14: Student project presentations

Jupyter Notebooks for Development Economics.

• github repository: github.com/jhconning/DevII

• rendered website: jhconning.github.io/DevII/

These materials support the PhD Econ 842: Development Seminar II at The Graduate Center at The City University of New York, but some of the jupyter notebooks may be of more general interest.

Jupyter notebooks mix markdown text, math, and executable code (in python, R, and stata) to produce output and visualizations. Many notebooks can be run interactively by clicking the rocket button at the top of each relevant page. This will launch the notebook in the cloud on a jupyter kernel server (Google Colab or Binder). Alternatively, download the notebook, or clone the entire DevII repository, to your local machine and run it there. Guides to getting started with jupyter, github, and python in the Tools section.

Jupyter Notebook Contents

(Also available from the website navigation bar))

Fall 2024 class

• Reading Schedule Fall 2024

Development Topics

• Growth + Structural Transformation
  • Lucas (1990) “Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?”
  • Volrath (2009) “How important are dual economy effects…”
  • Edgeworth Box: Efficiency in production allocation
  • The Specific Factors Model
  • Structural Transformation
  • The Harris-Todaro Model
• Production Organization/Institutions
  • Coase on Property and Social Cost
  • Farm Household Models
  • A Model of Land Enclosures
• Financial Contracting
  • Intertemporal Choice
  • Village consumption smoothing
  • Present-bias and renegotiation
  • Contracted Intermediaries and Corruption
• Empirical + Geospatial
  • Geospatial analysis in python
  • RD designs (in R)

Tools

• The Scientific Stack