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It is hard to believe that another academic year–my fourth at the University of Minnesota–has come and gone. Graduate commencement for students in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences was held on Friday, April 28, and given that this is my fourth year at Minnesota, my first batch of PhD students was graduating this year.

The Department of Applied Economics minted a number of new PhDs this year, who all deserve congratulations for the tremendous amount of work they have done and for their contributions to research in applied economics.

For my part, I am particularly excited about the three of my students who have successfully defended and are about to start their research careers. Starting this summer,

A few months ago Timothy Ogden sent me a copy of his new book, Experimental Conversations, for review.

I am happy to note that a review of it, which I wrote with University of Minnesota Applied Economics PhD student Jeff Bloem (if you are interested in development but don’t already read Jeff’s blog, you really should) is now forthcoming in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

You can read an ungated version of it here.

A few months ago, a post in this series discussed a recently published article in the American Political Science Review by Acharya et al. (2016, ungated version here) in which the authors developed a method to test whether a mediator variable [math]M[/math] is a mechanism whereby treatment variable [math]D[/math] causes outcome variable [math]Y[/math].

At the time, I suggested to one of my PhD students that she should use that method to test for a presumed mechanism in her job-market paper, but since her identification strategy was based on an IV, it really wasn’t clear that Acharya et al.’s method could be applied to her research question.

A few weeks ago, a new working paper by Dippel et al. (2017) was released titled “Instrumental Variables and Causal Mechanisms: Unpacking the Effect of Trade on Workers and Voters.” Although Dippel et al.’s application is really timely–Do trade shocks cause people to vote for populist parties by turning them into disgruntled workers?–I’ll focus in this post on their methodological innovation.