AgEcon Search Update-July 2014

AgEcon Search authors – sign up for the RePEc Author Service
We encourage all AgEcon Search authors to take advantage of the RePEc Author Service.

One big benefit is a monthly e-mail that includes the number of abstract views and file downloads for your papers listed in RePEc (Research Publications in Economics) http://repec.org/

Citations to all documents in AgEcon Search are harvested by RePEc and the Author Service maintains a publication list from which your monthly e-mail is generated.

To get started, go to https://authors.repec.org/ to register.

The registration process has 2 steps:
1. Enter your e-mail address, select a password, and tell the system which publications are yours.
2. Reply to the confirmation e-mail that will be sent to you shortly afterwards.

Thanks to Christian Zimmermann, his colleagues at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and all the other RePEc volunteers for maintaining this service.

Please stop by our booth at the AAEA Annual Meeting to ask questions or sign up.


AgEcon Search reaches 75,000 papers!
In early June 2014 the 75,000th paper was added to AgEcon Search:

Sharing R&D Investments in Cleaner Technologies to Mitigate Climate Change
Abeer El-Sayed and Santiago J. Rubio, University of Valencia
Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)
http://purl.umn.edu/172435

Thank you to all of the authors as well as those who submit on behalf of others and to the generous funders who have made special projects possible.

Linda Eells
Julie Kelly
Coordinators, AgEcon Search
http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/
aesearch@umn.edu

AAEA Trust Profile: Carola Grebitus

AAEA Trust Profile is a bi-monthly series following up with AAEA Trust sponsored scholarship, fellowship, and grant winners. This issue features Carola Grebitus, Assistant Professor of Food Industry Management, Morrison School of Agribusiness, W.P. Carey School of Business. Carola won the Sylvia Lane Mentor Fellowship in 2011. The Lane Mentor Fellowship provides an opportunity for young female scholars working on food, agricultural, or resource issues to collaborate with an established expert at another university, institution, or firm.

How did winning the Lane Mentor Fellowship help in accomplishing your research in measuring consumers' willingness to pay for local foods and food miles?
The Lane Mentor Fellowship enabled me to work together with Jayson Lusk and to visit Oklahoma State University where we worked intensively on two manuscripts we published from that project. I learned a lot from Jayson in terms of experimental economics and how to run experiments successfully. In our field, experience is important and Jayson always offers advice.

When you were at University of Bonn your research involved consumer behavior - with a focus on new technologies, food safety, health, and sustainability. Is that still your main research focus?
I still do a lot of work in these areas; although currently, my main focus lies on more theoretical questions regarding decision making. However, I always try to make an applied research contribution, too. Usually this contribution is either related to the economics of food choice and health or to sustainable decision making from a consumer's perspective.

Your mentor when you received the funding was Jayson Lusk from Oklahoma State University; do you still work or collaborate with him?
I believe that Jayson's mentoring was key for me in getting my current position at Arizona State University. Jayson and I still collaborate but currently more with regards to organizing conferences and workshops such as the 2nd AAEA/EAAE Symposium on 'Food Environment: The Effects of Context on Food' in 2012 in Boston, MA and the 2014 EAAE pre-congress workshop on 'Recent Trends in Experimental Economics'.

How did you meet your mentor for this mentorship?
I was already collaborating with Rudy Nayga, who then introduced me to Jayson Lusk at an AAEA meeting.

What lead you to pursue agricultural economics and modeling consumers' food choice?
Given that I graduated with a B.S. in Food Science and a M.S. in Food Economics, I was already interested in diet and health. With current issues such as high rates of obesity and sustainable consumption becoming more important, I believe that we have to develop a thorough understanding of consumer food choices as well as the underlying factors.

President's Column: Quality, Mutual Mentoring, and the AAEA Culture of Engagement

I began my term as President thinking and writing about how we, as professionals and as a professional association, define and certify the quality of our work as agricultural and applied economists. I noted that in our work in academia, government, and the private and non-profit sectors, we face common questions about quality standards, certification to those standards, and communicating about quality among ourselves and with others. As my term as President draws to a close, I believe these issues continue to be at the heart of how AAEA serves you, our members, and society. The AAEA Board’s on-going strategic planning is focused on supporting high quality work through communicating our work out through multiple outlets; innovating with our annual meeting, stand-alone symposia, and other AAEA events; and supporting mentoring programs.

Our association is built on a foundation of mutual mentoring and a culture of engagement. At my home institution, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, our Center for Teaching and Faculty Development describes the Mutual Mentoring approach as recognizing that individuals will need and want mentorship from a network of mentors, each of whom has specific strengths to offer in terms of perspective and advice. The mutual mentoring approach also recognizes that mentoring is rarely one-way; the mentor learns from the mentee as well as vice versa, making for a mentoring partnership. Importantly, an individual’s mentoring network can be significantly strengthened through mutual mentoring relationships with others who are at a similar career stage be it, for example, undergraduate or graduate student, assistant professor, new researcher at a government agency, associate or full professor, or new chair or branch chief. Each of these career stages demands the development of new abilities by us as individuals. As your professional organization, AAEA through its members and staff provides platforms for effective mutual mentoring to take place, with a special emphasis on early career professionals. Strengthening and building opportunities for mutual mentoring is in my view a key direction for AAEA in the next years.

Mutual mentoring is also a major component of the AAEA’s Culture of Engagement. Our upcoming annual meeting in Minneapolis embodies this high level of engagement with plenary sessions, invited papers, symposia, presented papers, posters, Section Tracks, and undergraduate and graduate competitions where you and your colleagues will be presenting your work and receiving direct feedback that supports the quality of your work. And no doubt that mutual mentoring will extend to conversations during coffee breaks, receptions, and other opportunities to meet and exchange ideas. I look forward to meeting and talking with you in Minneapolis! I also look forward to welcoming Jill McCluskey as President-Elect taking office at this meeting and David Just and Holly Wang who will be taking office as Directors.

The Culture of Engagement is supported by the very high quality of involvement of AAEA members in all aspects of AAEA’s work. I thank the Committee Chairs and Members who agreed to take on important roles in guiding the association this year and the Leadership of the Sections, all of whom served so well. I also thank our AAEA staff Brian Mondragón Jones (Executive Director), Sarah Kenner, Kristen Wright, Anna Douangphachanh, and Angela Ludwig for their dedicated and very effective management of the AAEA.

And, finally, our association has benefitted greatly from the service of Richard Sexton (Past-President), Jayson Lusk (Director), and Dawn Thilmany McFadden (Director) over the last three years. Thank you for your commitment to the AAEA’s Culture of Engagement.

See you all in Minneapolis!

Julie Caswell
AAEA President

Gail L. Cramer Appreciation Club to be Chartered in Minneapolis

The AAEA Trust is pleased to announce that the Gail L. Cramer Appreciation Club has successfully raised the $12,500 in donations necessary to have the Club officially chartered at the 2014 AAEA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis. Thanks to the efforts of the appreciation club donors and co-organizers, members will be able to show their respect for the work that Dr. Cramer has done to advance the profession, by contributing to the Gail L. Cramer Appreciation Club.

During the AAEA Awards & Fellows Recognition Ceremony on Monday, July 28, Dr. Cramer will be presented with a calligraphic plaque that celebrates the official chartering of the Club in his honor.

To donate to the Gail L. Cramer Appreciation Club, please contact the AAEA Business Office (info@aaea.org).

AAEA/AARES Heading South Award Call for Applications

We are pleased to invite submissions for the 2014 Heading South Award.

The Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society(AARES) and the Agricultural &Applied Economics Association (AAEA) through the AAEA Trust will jointly offer this travel award to attend the 2015 AARES Conference in Rotorua, New Zealand. It is available to members of AARES or AAEA normally resident in North America. Applicants for the award can be a member of either AARES or AAEA but must be a member of AARES to participate in the conference.

 
The objective of the award is to provide the winner with an opportunity for professional and personal development and international professional and cultural exchange. The award will have a value of US $3,000 to be used to assist the winner to participate in the 2015 Annual Conference of AARES to be held in Rotorua, New Zealand from February 10-13, 2015.

Selection Process
The 2014 Heading South Selection Committee will be chaired by the AAEA President, Barry Goodwin. Other members will include the President-Elect of AARES, Prof. Alan Randall, another member of AARES, usually the president of the North America Branch, and another member of AAEA.

Applications should include:

• a paper for presentation at the AARES Annual Conference in Rotorua, for which the applicant is the sole or first author and which represents their original and unpublished work,
• a one-page biographical statement, and
• a one-page statement in support of their application, indicating what they would hope to accomplish through the award, why they would be deserving of the award, and confirming that they would be unable to attend the conference without this financial support.

Submission Deadlines and Details
Electronic submissions (in PDF form) for this award must be emailed to Brian Mondragón Jones ‎(bmjones@aaea.org) by Friday, August 29, 2014 (for travel in February 2015).

Judges Needed for GSS/AEM Case Study Competition

The Graduate Student (GSS) and Agribusiness Economics Management (AEM) Sections of AAEA need your assistance. We need a total of eight to twelve judges for the preliminary rounds.  The time commitment is two to three hours on Sunday morning (July 27), depending on the number of teams.

This is a very rewarding experience for the graduate students. Judges in the past years also enjoyed the competition. Those interested in participating may contact Aslihan Spaulding (spaulding@ilstu.edu) or Brandon McFadden (brandon.mcfadden@okstate.edu). 

The GSS and AEM thank you in advance for your assistance!

Aslihan Spaulding             Brandon McFadden

AEM Chair                           GSS Chair