Marc F. Bellemare Posts

That is the title of a new working paper I have with my Purdue University colleague Bernhard Dalheimer and my Master’s student Weston Loughmiller.

It is nice to be able to share this manuscript, which started with the observation that criticisms on efficiency grounds of policies like farm subsidies, while correct within the narrow framework of the textbook model, broadly tend to miss the mark because they miss an important externality, viz. that being able to protect its citizens from hunger in times of conflict is important for a state. That is, when economists tend to criticize such policies (and, more broadly, agricultural protection), they usually suffer from tunnel vision in that they tend to ignore what the textbook model assumes away, and end up worshipping the symbol (i.e., the model) for the thing symbolized (i.e., reality).

My paper with Dan Millimet titled “On the (Mis) Use of the Fixed Effects Estimator” has been accepted and is now forthcoming at the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. If you want a link to a .pdf of the accepted version of the paper or to a Stata .do file showing you how to use the alternative estimators we discuss in the paper, scroll all the way to the end of this post. If you want a bit of storytelling about how this paper came about, and what it does, read on.

My paper with Bernhard Dalheimer titled “Global Agricultural Value Chains and Food Prices” has been accepted and is now forthcoming at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

I am glad that this is finally accepted for publication: Bernhard and I first discussed it in 2022 when he was here for his postdoc, and he began presenting it when he was on the job market that same year, in early 2023. Since then, the paper has only gotten better as a result of comments from colleagues. I really like that it marries Bernhard’s interests in international trade and agricultural value chains with my own interest in food prices and agricultural value chains.