It's actually like running a small business.

Here's why:

1. Income. I have applied to at least 16 sources of funding (and counting). That's 16 proposals, 16 budgets (because each grant/fellowship wants their own budget) and <16 sources of income (can't win 'em all).  I finally made a separate bank account for research monies, but that was a year into fieldwork. Why didn't anyone tell me to do that earlier?

2. Labor. I have employees in Tanzania and am occasionally surprised to find that I am the boss there. I'm thankful that I have actual professional work experience, decent leadership skills and excellent communication (for an academic, obviously).

3. Capital. That aforementioned research bank account that I finally opened? It includes reimbursed ATM fees (even internationally!), cheap international financial transfers and a personal banker that I can easily call up when I need another transfer to Tanzania (like, today). This type of fancy bank stuff does not come free to a graduate student with little capital, the account is co-signed by my dad.

4. I market my brand. I have a website.  I put some actual thought into the design and modeled it after doing some market research. Thanks, friends. In addition to getting valuable feedback from peers, the main point of going to conferences and giving talks in other departments is to market myself and my research.

5. I make my own schedule. My daily dissertation progress, or lack there of, is a cost or benefit that only I bear. Sometimes distracting and lucrative consulting opportunities fall into my lap. Sometimes its 72 degrees outside. Sometimes I stay in Tanzania way longer than I'd like. Often times, I work on weekends. No one is responsible for managing my time and risk, except me.

6. Zero personal life boundary. Why do my university and personal emails go to the same inbox? Because it would be too difficult to differentiate which emails are related to work/school and which emails are personal. My coauthors are my friends, I meet with students at 9pm, beer is often consumed over reviewer comments, I keep a change of clothes in my cubicle, my home bookshelf is dominated by textbooks and I live part-time in a researcher flop house.**

7. It's an unpredictable crap shoot. Sometimes I wake up at 4am and I have four emails from my employee (i.e. field assistant) that say we miscalculated some costs and I need to send cash, stat. Thus the value of #2.


**Based on this description, it is safe to say that I am single and child-less. I hope that this boundary might get a little thicker when I  a) am no longer a student and b) no longer single or child-less.

Marc Bellemare and Tim Beatty have three graduate fellowships to study food security in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota.  Read about the opportunity here.

Also, you should not go into debt for a PhD. Not financial debt, anyway. Social life debt and a very high opportunity cost, maybe.

Consumer behavior responses to SNAP benefits (i.e. food stamps) is a popular research topic for applied economists. And hypotheses about the impact of limiting SNAP benefit spending on junk food makes for an engaging conversation topic (over cookies and beer) at our department's happy hour.

Then comes the juxtaposition: The associate professor advisor has a large grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the impact of SNAP benefits in Minnesota. His advisee, a graduate student on department funding to work on this project as a research assistant (which is, according to the department, enough funding to cover the full cost of attending graduate school), is a SNAP recipient. Not in an ironic way.

Well, I don't actually have the answer to this. But apparently some people at some universities are thinking about the answer. Including, as previously mentioned, the cool kids.

At a conference this weekend, I met a female grad student from another large Midwestern university. In the most recent candidate search in her department, she asked her advisor if the search committee could make some effort to find a female economist to add to their ranks (currently, there is one tenured female faculty member in the department).

His response was that the department has struggled to recruit women faculty because there aren't enough industry jobs in their mid-sized Midwestern city for their husbands to find employment. In her words, she called his bluff: the sociology department at the same university is over half female. She believes that the its a struggle to bring in female faculty because the department that is already so male-dominated (in other words, the reason there aren't more women in leadership is that there aren't more women in leadership). So, departments, go out of your way to change that dynamic and start figuring out how to answer this question.

Update 4/1/2014
I was doing a lot of hypothesizing above. I talked to a friend who has actually experienced the job market as a female economist and she brings to light two points. Both challenge my previously implied hypothesis that the econ departments were simply not doing enough to hire women, based on the fact that the sociologists have plenty.

1. Who do female sociologists and economists marry? There's a good chance that the pool of trailing husbands is not the same.

2. Female economists have more outside options. Many female economists could get jobs in cities like DC, Boston and New York City, where their spouses have huge amounts of industry (or academic) options. The non-academic job market in these large cities is probably smaller for sociologists.
h/t: Professor T.

Also, relocation is a whole lot easier when one spouse has a geographically dispersed occupation.

A traveler reflects on the conundrum:

I’ve heard people say it’s for the principle—because people always jack up the prices [to tourists] at least 200%.  Even so, the quick buck we save means so much more for their standard of living than it does to us. I’ve also heard people say 'but if you pay full price, then all the prices will slowly go up.'

I am a pretty serious haggler in Tanzania. I've been stewing over this question though, and have several answers to why I do it, none of which is individually sufficient:

1. I actually gain utility by getting more stuff for a cheaper price. Possible.

2. I am indoctrinated. The world of economics has taught (peer-pressured?) me to believe that I gain utility by getting more stuff for a cheaper price. It is certainly true that I would be happier if my rent went down. But how much utility do I really get from acquiring a beautifully designed fabric for $5.50 instead of $6? Slim returns on fifty cents and I'm already skeptical of the notion that utility gains are objective (i.e. I am fully aware that the $1 earns much more utility for the vendor than it does for me). But, hey, I'm supposed to care about maximizing my utility and its still money, right? Feasible.

3. Price inflation externality. Or, "if you pay full price, all the prices will slowly go up." The only time I experienced this was when I went to the most touristy market in Arusha and tried to make a few few vendor friends the day before all my Americans friends arrived in Tanzania. Generally, though, I'm not under the impression that my individual bargaining has that much of an impact on prices. Not extremely likely.

4. Bravado. Real Tanzanians bargain. I speak Swahili. I know the market. I do not want to seem like an ignorant tourist. I'm hate feeling like an outsider. Doing the stuff that Tanzanians do earns me a little bit more respect- not the kind of respect that a boss has by virtue of her position, but the street-cred kind of respect that you have to work for. It's nuanced, never fully attainable and almost frivolous, but it earns me two points in my favor since I'll never get stop being a white spectacle. Highly likely.

hat tips: CJM & MAM

1. It turns out that contract farming shortens the duration of periods of hunger during the dry season (in addition to increasing income) for smallholder farmers in Madagascar. Is contract farming specific to developing countries? Nope; Tyson's popularized it in the chicken market in 1947. Don Tyson developed industrial chicken production (and contributed to the oligopoly of the chicken market) through a high-tech form of sharecropping.

2. Women in academia are less likely to collaborate with junior colleagues. Keep in mind that the sample size is 55 female faculty members in this study. That is less than the number of female faculty members in the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota.

3. How (the demand for) toilet paper (and other types of sanitation) explain (wealth in) the world

4. Images from Crimea.

"But how are the scholarship recipients supposed to study when they live in one dirty room with six siblings and a single mother?" asked a fellow board-member (and veteran school counselor) during our meeting last night for a Tanzanian education NGO. 

He had visited the homes of secondary school scholarship recipients and came away feeling frustrated. And now this small, highly efficient education NGO is offering loans and exploring construction opportunities.

I made a point for narrower goals, having just read about development bloat, but I'll admit that the slippery slope towards mission creep is, in fact, covered in ice. It is especially tempting to reach beyond your organizations original goals when you start to notice all the other symptoms of poverty that prevent your single intervention from working (or if you exhibit any form of empathy).

1. In fact, under the assumption that consumption is proportional to wealth, the estimates imply that a doubling of wealth will cause the average Ivorian farmer to demand an additional one-quarter of a wife.

Jacoby, H. G. (1995). The economics of polygyny in Sub-Saharan Africa: Female productivity and the demand for wives in Côte d'Ivoire. Journal of Political Economy, 938-971.

2. A reduction in the number of children born to a couple can increase the representation of their children in the next generation if this enables the couple to invest sufficiently more in the education, training, and "attractiveness" of each child to increase markedly their probability of survival to reproductive ages and the reproduction of each survivor.

Becker, Gary Stanley, and Gary S. Becker. A Treatise on the Family. Harvard university press, 2009.

3. This is consistent with previous literature, which suggests that wives may serve as an alternate form of capital accumulation.

Akresh, Richard, Joyce J. Chen, and Charity Moore. "Altruism, Cooperation and Intrahousehold Allocation: Agricultural Production in Polygynous Households." UW Madison AAE department seminar. 2011.

Don't quote economics papers to win friends.