Marc F. Bellemare Posts

There’s a name I expect many readers of this blog to not necessarily be familiar with. Claude Montmarquette was one of my professors at the Université de Montréal, where he also served as co-advisor for my Master’s thesis. After suffering from cancer for longer than he could bear it, he passed away of his own free will and accord in Montreal at the age of 78, when he requested a medically assisted death.

I learned so much from Mr. Montmarquette.* Although he was a pioneer in the field of experimental economics, he was more broadly an applied econometrician and, as such, he contributed to many different fields: labor economics, education economics, health economics, and so on. You can see his Google Scholar profile here. In the spring of 2000, I was lucky to be one of the students in his ECN6233–Microeconometrics class. This was well before the Credibility Revolution, well before applied micro became the cool thing to do in economics. His class was broken up in three parts: (i) discrete choice and limited dependent variables, (ii) panel data, and (iii) duration analysis. I learned more from that one class than I did taking three econometrics classes (of which two were titled “applied econometrics”) in grad school.

I can directly trace Mr. Montmarquette’s influence on my entire career so far. My first publication (Bellemare and Barrett 2006), in which I wrote down a likelihood to model the decision to either buy, sell, or remain autarkic and, conditional on choosing to be a buyer or a seller, how much to buy or how much to sell? That was directly informed by how he taught us in 6233 that you could always combine bits of likelihood together to model decision processes. My more recent article (Bellemare and Novak 2017), in which we look at whether participation agricultural value chains causes a household’s hungry season to be shorter? I would never have thought of writing it had it not been for the fact that Mr. Montmarquette taught us duration models in 6233. And over the next few months, I am planning on revisiting some of the concepts he has taught us in 6233 for a new paper.

In the summer of 2020, after finishing the first version of our paper on the front-door criterion, I dropped Mr. Montmarquette a note to thank him for having been such a fundamental influence on my thinking and on my career. It was nice to get a reply from him, in which he said he had just finished reading Pearl’s Book of Why.

What I particularly admired in Mr. Montmarquette was his policy engagement, and the fact that he never pulled any punches. Having done his PhD at Chicago, the framework he used to view the world was often at odds with the modal framework used to view the world in Quebec. Yet he never worried about saying unpopular things, and he always had an iron-clad reasoning for his policy positions.

When I heard of his passing, I told my wife that I felt as though the adults were slowly exiting the stage to leave us in charge, and that the world felt much emptier all of a sudden. Mr. Montmarquette’s shoes will be big ones to fill.

* We don’t call our instructors Professor So-and-So over there, but Mr. or Ms. So-and-So.

From the Journal Citations Report, here is the new top 5 of journals in the “agricultural economics and policy” category:

1. Annual Review of Resource Economics 5.184
2. Aquaculture Economics and Management 4.761
3. Food Policy 4.552
4. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 4.083
5. American Journal of Agricultural economic 4.082

The number to the right of each journal name is the journal’s impact factor, which has been calculated on the basis of calendar year 2020 citation numbers.

This has been a good year for the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE), which I have been co-editing since January 2020, as our impact factor went from 3.082 to above 4. This has also been a good year for Food Policy, which I co-edited from 2015 to 2019 with Mario Mazzocchi: the journal’s impact factor went from 4.189 to above 4.5.

Obviously, I am pleased that both journals I have been associated with are doing so well. All credit goes to the co-editors I have had the honor to work with as well as our associate editors, reviewers, the publishing staff we work with, and the authors who elect to submit high-quality manuscripts to the journals.

Also of note is the fact that, by impact factor, the AJAE slightly ahead of the Journal of Health Economics slightly behind the Journal of Labor Economics.

HT: Sendhil R., who sent these rankings along while the Clarivate website was down.

UPDATE: The AJAE ranks 62 among all economics journals by impact factor. The full top 10 of journals in the “agricultural economics and policy” category is:

1. Annual Review of Resource Economics 5.184
2. Aquaculture Economics and Management 4.761
3. Food Policy 4.552
4. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 4.083
5. American Journal of Agricultural economic 4.082
6. European Review of Agricultural Economics 3.836
7. Journal of Agricultural Economics 3.581
8. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics 2.863
9. Agricultural Economics 2.585
10. British Food Journal 2.518

A question from a graduate student:

Based on our conversation about my interests, what are the most important ones (5? perhaps more?) that I should be paying attention to?

If there is some blog post you could point me to about the taxonomy of the field, I would be appreciative. I have heard the term “top 5 journals” thrown around a lot but I couldn’t tell you which ones they were, moreover I’m not sure if general top 5 econ = top 5 development.

My answer, edited for clarity and grammar:

Good question! Traditionally the top five journals in economics are: the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Review of Economic Studies. 

I say “traditionally,” because there are now seven or eight “top-five” journals. Taking the five I mentioned, you can add the Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the Economic Journal, and maybe even the new the American Economic Review: Insights and the Journal of the European Economic Association.

In development economics, the top journals are the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, World Development, the World Bank Economic Review, and the Journal of Development Studies.

In agricultural economics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics is top (historically, if not by impact factor) along with Food Policy, Agricultural Economics, Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, and maybe the European Review of Agricultural Economics.

It’s hard to subscribe to just five table-of-contents emails, to be honest. Five is what you’d get in a field, but most development folks are interested in one other field (agricultural economics in my case), and then you have to know what’s published in top general journals because they often publish things that are germane to your research interests.

I should also have added: Among the general sciences journals, which often publish stuff of relevance to agricultural, development, and environmental economists, the top three are Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science.

Over the years, I’ve found that the best way to keep up (short of having a departmental librarian who emails you the tables of contents you are interested in every time those journals release a new issue, as is the case in our department), is via RSS feed. Most journals have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to with a reader. I used to use Google Reader, but Google did away with it, and so now I use feedly, which is free (and is also how I keep up with blogs).