Marc F. Bellemare Posts

For the past year, Jeff Bloem, Sunghun Lim, and I have been hard at work on a chapter for the forthcoming volume 6 of the Elsevier-North Holland Handbook of Agricultural Economics on agricultural value chains in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We finally managed to finish writing a draft of it, and so I thought of posting it here. I apologize in advance for any oversight on our part. Given the comprehensive nature of those chapters, and given our blind spots, and given that this is not the pre-print version and that it will be going out to reviewers for comments, we welcome any and all comments if you have them.

Here is the abstract:

We present an overview of the literature on agri-food value chains in low- and middle-income countries. Starting from farmers’ decision of whether to move away from subsistence agriculture to participate in agri-food value chains, we study the process whereby agricultural commodities make their way from the farm-gate to the final consumer, documenting the procurement relationships that arise and the organization of markets at every step of the way. In each step, we take stock of the empirical evidence, critically assess the research so far, and offer a number of directions for future research. We further discuss the challenges and opportunities for global agri-food value chains.

Writing one of these chapters is a lot of work, especially right on the heels of writing a book. Given that, I expect I will be going back to writing plain-old articles for the foreseeable future.

If you subscribe to this blog via email, you may have noticed that this blog has been relatively quiet for the past year or so.

That’s because I have been working a book titled Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School―But Didn’t, which will be published by MIT Press in May 2022.

The book covers writing papers, giving talks, navigating peer review, finding funding, doing professional service, and advising students.

As such, long-time readers of this blog will be familiar with some of the contents of the book (an early version of chapter 2, on writing papers, for instance, can be found here), but much of the book will feature new material.

I wrote that book to foster equity and level the playing field in economics, but a lot of what I discuss is also applicable to other quantitative social sciences (e.g., business, political science, public policy), and so the book will be useful to researchers in those disciplines as well.

Pre-orders drive the attention a book receives in terms of promotion from the publisher and from book sellers, and so if you feel so inclined, consider pre-ordering the book if you think it will be useful to you or someone you know; the book is relatively cheap at $25 for the paperback version, or $19 for the Kindle version. Here is the Amazon pre-order link; see here for alternative options.

(With apologies to those who have seen this announcement before, either on Twitter or via the #OARES mailing list.)

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.