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Estimating Treatment Effects with the Front-Door Criterion

My paper with Jeff Bloem (IFPRI) and Noah Wexler (UMN, Humphrey School) titled “The Paper of How: Estimating Treatment Effects with the Front-Door Criterion” is now published (and accessible free of charge, thanks to the University of Minnesota libraries covering open access) in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. You can access it here. Here is the abstract, followed by some miscellaneous thoughts about this research project:

Research Ethics in Applied Economics

That’s the title of a wonderful new book by Anna Josephson and Jeff Michler of the University of Arizona who cover the ethics related to the entirety of the research process, from early research ideas to the dissemination of research findings on social media and interacting with policy makers, and everything in between.

When I was asked by Anna and Jeff to blurb the book, I wrote after I finished reading an advance copy that “[i]n a book that is as broad as it is deep, [the authors] set the standard for what constitutes ethical research in applied economics.”

I finished reading it, and I stand by that assessment. A lot of academic writing is excessively narrow, often out of a desire by authors to establish themselves as experts. Conversely, when academics try to make broader statements, they tend to not delve too deeply about the issues involved. Anna and Jeff have managed to cover a wide range of topics, and they cover nearly each and every one of those topics at depth. This is a book which I wish I would have been able to read when I was a first-year PhD student thinking about research topics in-between problem sets and exams.

Global Agricultural Value Chains and Food Prices

That is the title of a new working paper by Bernhard Dalheimer (currently a postdoc in our department, but headed to Purdue, where he will start in the fall as an assistant professor), Sunghun Lim (Louisiana State), and me.

We ask a simple question: How does the extent of a country’s participation in global agri-food value chains (GAVCs, or “GA-vicks”) translate in terms of food price levels and food price volatility?