---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Brian Dillon <bdillon2@uw.edu> Date: Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 3:03 PM Subject: [jsde] Paul Christian -- Joint Seminar in Development Economics on Monday, February 26 To: jsde@u.washington.edu Please join us *Monday, February 26*, for the Joint Seminar in Development Economics with Paul Christian from the World Bank. The seminar is from *11:00am - 12:30pm in Savery 410*. Title and abstract below, and the paper is attached. We hope to see you there! ______________________________________________ *Revisiting the Effect of Food Aid on Conflict: A Methodological Caution* Paul Christian and Christopher B. Barrett A popular identification strategy in non-experimental panel data uses instrumental variables constructed by interacting exogenous but potentially spurious time series or spatial variables with endogenous exposure variables to generate identifying variation through assumptions like those of differences-in-differences estimators. Revisiting a celebrated study linking food aid and conflict shows that this strategy is susceptible to bias arising from spurious trends. Re-randomization and Monte Carlo simulations show that the strategy identifies a spurious relationship even when the true effect could be non-causal or causal in the opposite direction, invalidating the claim that aid causes conflict and providing a caution for similar strategies. -- Brian Dillon Assistant Professor Evans School of Public Policy and Governance University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 bdillon2@uw.edu +1 206.221.4601 <(206)%20221-4601> *All emails sent to or from this address are subject to public records requests under State of Washington law.* _______________________________________________ jsde mailing list jsde@u.washington.edu http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/jsde