- Why was nitrogen the limiting factor in feeding the world despite making up most of the atmosphere?
Development Economics
The economics of growth and poverty reduction in developing countries.
- Why was the world's nitrogen supply running out before Haber's process existed?
- In what sense did the Haber-Bosch process end up inside the bodies of most people alive today?
- What fields eventually relied on artificially produced radioisotopes?
- How did Virtanen's AIV method use acid to keep silage from rotting without ruining its nutritional value?
- Why did Norman Borlaug breed wheat with shorter stems, and how did that prevent crop collapse?
- How did Borlaug's wheat varieties resist the rust fungi that had historically devastated harvests?
- What political obstacles did Borlaug have to overcome to get his wheat planted in India and Pakistan?
- How much did wheat production in India and Pakistan change after adopting Borlaug's varieties in the late 1960s?
- What did Schultz mean by calling education and health 'human capital'?
- What does Arthur Lewis's dual-sector model say happens to wages as workers move from farms to factories?
- What does Modigliani's life-cycle hypothesis predict about how households borrow, save, and spend over a lifetime?
- What areas of human behavior did Gary Becker analyze using microeconomic tools?
- What did Becker's 1968 paper on crime argue about how offenders make decisions?
- How did Amartya Sen show that famines can occur even while food is still being exported from the affected region?
- What is the difference between measuring poverty by income and measuring it by Sen's idea of capabilities?
- How did Sen's work influence the creation of the United Nations' Human Development Index?
- What documented case did James Watson build his historical account around?
- What observation about a Bangladeshi stool-maker led Yunus to his first microloans?
- How did Grameen Bank's lending model scale from forty-two villagers to millions of borrowers?
- Why did the Nobel committee frame microfinance as a peace initiative rather than an economic one?
- What have later studies found about the actual effectiveness of microcredit programs?
- How much more milk did named dairy cows produce compared to anonymous herd members, according to the Newcastle study?
- What does this study suggest about the physiological effects of low-stress animal handling?
- Why are national averages misleading when measuring poverty within a country?
- How did Angus Deaton's methods change poverty measurement in India?
- Why did earlier development economics prescriptions like structural adjustment and microfinance have an uneven track record?
- How did Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer adapt the randomised controlled trial from medicine to test anti-poverty programs?
- Why did Esther Duflo's win make her both the youngest and only the second woman to receive the economics prize?
- How many people was the WFP reaching by 2019, and in how many countries?
- What prediction did Paul Ehrlich make in 'The Population Bomb,' and why did it fail to come true?
- Why did 'The Population Bomb' remain influential even after its central forecasts proved wrong?