Author: Marc F. Bellemare

In 2018, in the midst of the longest economic expansion in US history, national and international media outlets were citing commodity prices and financial stress as significant factors affecting the mental health of US farmers.

Most such stories drew parallels between then-current agricultural conditions and the conditions faced by farmers during the farm crisis of the 1980s, when 900 farmers died by suicide in response to farm debt doubling in the early 1980s. As a result, those same stories often emphasized farmer suicides and the unique set of risk factors associated with agriculture, noting that, between 2014 and 2018, 450 farmers had killed themselves.

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:

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.