Seth Gitter, Ph.D., Department of Economics, will give a sabbatical presentation at 12 p.m. on Friday, May 8 in Stephens Hall, room 106 as part of the College of Business and Economics’ annual Development and Research Conference.
Abstract:
“The Welfare Impacts of Rising Quinoa Prices: Evidence from Peru” presented by Seth Gitter
Riding on a wave of Western interest in “superfoods,” quinoa – a grain that has been grown for centuries in the Andes – has gone from largely unknown outside of Latin America to an upper-class staple in the US and Western Europe in less than a decade. Concurrent with this increased demand for quinoa, there has been a sharp rise in the price of quinoa over the last 10 years. We study the impacts of rising quinoa prices on the welfare of households in Peru. Using 10 years of a nationally representative, large-scale household survey, we combine pseudo-panel and difference-in-differences methods to estimate the relationship between quinoa production and household consumption. We find that conditional on baseline values, quinoa production is associated with higher consumption and lower variance of consumption expenditures, indicating that the production of quinoa has both first- and second-order effects on household welfare.
