Marc F. Bellemare Posts

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).

I realized last week that I hadn’t blogged in over two months. And given that I have a new article out which I consider to be among my very best pieces of economics, I thought now would be a good time to dust off this blog.

Before I get into details, the paper is titled “Contract Farming as Partial Insurance.” It is coauthored with two of my former PhD students, Yu Na Lee and Lindsey Novak. Here is the abstract:

A core result of contract theory is that contracts can help transfer risk from one party to another, the latter insuring the former. We test this prediction and explore the mechanism behind it in the context of contract farming, the economic institution wherein a processor contracts the production of a commodity to a grower. Specifically, we look at whether participation in contract farming is associated with lower levels of income variability in a sample of 1,200 households in Madagascar. Relying on a framed field experiment aimed at eliciting respondent marginal utility of participation in contract farming for identification in a selection-on-observables design, we find that participation in contract farming is associated with a 0.20-standard deviation decrease in income variability. Using mediation analysis to look at the mechanism behind this finding, we find support for the hypothesis that fixed-price contracts—which transfer all price risk from the grower to the processor—explain the reduction in income variability associated with contract farming. Because the assumption that makes our selection-on-observables design possible also satisfies the conditional independence assumption, we estimate propensity score matching and doubly robust weighted regression estimators, the results of which show that our core results are robust and that participation in contract farming would likely be more beneficial for those households that do not participate than for those who do. Our findings thus support the notion that, in a context where formal insurance markets fail, contracts can serve as partial insurance mechanisms.

I said above that this paper is among my very best pieces of economics, and I believe it is so for several reasons.

First, this paper successfully combines two strands in my research agenda: (i) the study of agricultural value chains, and (ii) the study of price volatility.

Second, the paper looks at a classic research question in economics dating back to at least Stiglitz’s (1974) paper on share tenancy, viz. Can bilateral agreements (i.e., contracts) to remedy market failures? In the context of this paper: Do people rely on contract farming arrangements to partially insure against price risk given insurance market failures?

Third, the paper starts from a simple theoretical model to derive testable implications, which it then tests using data. There was a time when empirical papers in development economics clearly stated their theory before discussing any empirics, and that is a throwback to that era of development economics. And one of the things that comes out of the theoretical model is that the mechanism whereby people enter contract farming in order to partially insure is through fixed-price contracts. We use mediation analysis at the end to test that hypothesis, and we find that fixed-price contracts (as opposed to, say, a portfolio balancing approach where income from contracting is negatively correlated with income from other sources) appear to be the only mechanism (statistically speaking, that is) explaining the relationship between participation in contract farming and income volatility.

(Also, and this may well be idiosyncratic, but I have been in love with applied contract theory since I was an undergraduate, and this is my finest piece of applied contract theory.)

Finally, and more importantly for policy, although we find that participation in contract farming is associated with a roughly 16 percent decrease in income volatility on average, the effect would be greater for those who do not participate (about 21 percent) than it is for those who actually participate (about 11 percent).