The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Cornell University are jointly sponsoring a conference to launch a systematic and comprehensive investigation of threshold effects and non-linearities in growth and development. The conference will be held in Washington, DC on May 11-13, 2005. It will feature invited keynote papers, as well as papers that were submitted following a Call for Papers. The conference is by invitation only. Threshold effects and non-linearities are increasingly recognized to be present in the development process, and in the effects of policy on development. Traditionally, threshold effects were present in discussions of "stages of growth" or "the big push" and non-linearity was present in the Kuznets "inverse-U hypothesis." More recently, however, questions have been raised about the presumed linearity of many of the effects identified in growth regressions. Keynote papers will be delivered by the following:

• Daron Acemoglu (MIT)
• Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess (LSE)
• David Canning (Harvard)
• Bradford DeLong (UC Berkeley)
• Steven Durlauf (Wisconsin)
• William Easterly (NYU)
• Michael Kremer (Harvard)