June and July are the conferences’ months, and this year, I attended the European Environmental Economics meeting in Cyprus, the International Consortium of Applied Bioeconomy Research in Buenos Aires, and a one-day workshop on Circular Bioeconomy in Omaha and visited family in Israel. I got used to paying the price for international travel ..read more

My dissertation assessed the impact of water quality regulation in the San Joaquin Valley. We wondered if farmers would adopt cleaner practices and invest in wastewater management under alternative regulations and to what extent the regulations are burdensome economically. I went to the valley and interviewed many farmers and realized that some of the solutions ..read more

co-authored with Tymofiy Mylovanov (Kyiv School of Economics) Corruption has been humanity’s scourge since the beginning of time. We may debate when corruption started but frankly it does not matter whether it was Eve or the serpent who corrupted Adam or somebody else who committed this sin for the first time. The important thing is ..read more

coauthored with Anastasia Fedyk (University of California, Berkeley), James Hodson (AI for Good Foundation), Ilona Sologoub (VoxUkraine), and Tatyana Deryugina (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Recently a representative of Putin’s opposition, Leonid Volkov (who resigned from chairing the Navalny fund upon the revelation of his signature under the letter calling for lifting sanctions off individual ..read more

Dear Dr. Sachs, We are a group of economists, including many Ukrainians, who were appalled by your statements on the Russian war against Ukraine and were compelled to write this open letter to address some of the historical misrepresentations and logical fallacies in your line of argument. Following your repeated appearances on the talk shows ..read more

Co-authored with Ilona Sologoub at VoxUkraine Winston Churchill, a bigger-than-life statesman and prolific author, observed, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” He was largely successful and received a Nobel prize in literature “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted ..read more

co-authored by Ilona Sologoub (VoxUkraine), Tetyana Deryugina (U of Illinois), Tanya Babina (Columbia U.), James Hodson (AI for good)   The Russian war in Ukraine is far from being over, but perhaps it is a natural time to think about what will happen after the Russian aggression is defeated. Indeed, the allies were discussing the ..read more

  Some of the best jobs in academia are to be a professor of Cooperative Extension at Berkeley. The Cooperative Extension is one of the greatest inventions of the American educational system, designed to transfer knowledge to and learn from the experience of practitioners in agriculture and industry. We have two types of extension professionals ..read more

When I arrived in Berkeley for my Ph.D. about 50 years ago (1973, before the Yom Kippur War), I learned that the department of Agricultural Economics, which I joined, had several faculty members who were extension specialists. Their job has been to do real applied research and to provide information and education to adults (regular ..read more

For over 230 days, Ukraine has been resisting Russian aggression. This war brings death and destruction at a scale not seen in Europe since WWII and the ripples of the war are felt everywhere—from the Ukrainian families who lost their loved ones to African countries that face the prospect of hunger. A long war rather ..read more