Lobbying and AIDS

A job market seminar at lunchtime. The paper is an extension of Grossman-Helpman (1994)'s lobbying model. But several comments raised by LSE faculty members were related to the lobbying model itself, rather than the speaker's extension, suggesting that it may not be a good idea to analyze lobbying behaviour based on Grossman-Helpman's framework... (The speaker ran out of time to explain her own contribution as she spent a lot of time to convince the audience on Grossman-Helpman's model.)

Late in the afternoon, Shanta Devarajan from the World Bank gave a talk for DESTIN Friday Visiting Speaker Series. The talk was probably based on this paper.

While I was listening to the lecture, I remembered what Yamada-kun wrote to me in email. He's been doing the literature survey on the macroeconomic impact of AIDS. His current conclusion is that the effect of AIDS can be in either direction depending on the assumption you make regarding the effect of AIDS on fertility rates.

Devarajan's model seemed to assume that AIDS does not have any impact on fertility rates. During the question time, I asked him on this. (I needed to pluck up the courage to do this... But I gotta do this as the challenge I'm facing right now is speak out at seminars.)

Devarajan's answer was that there is no hard evidence on the effect of AIDS on fertility. So he took a neutral stance.

If you do empirical research on this in an econometrically convincing way, I'm sure your paper will be cited by every paper dealing with macroeconomic impacts of AIDS...