Marc F. Bellemare Posts

If you have been paying attention to this space at all, you will have noticed that my former student, coauthor, and colleague Jeff Bloem and I launched a seminar series–the Online Agricultural and Resource Economics Seminar, or #OARES for short–last May.

Last week, our planned presenter had to cancel, and so we had a bye week. This gave Jeff and me time to organize the next six months of #OARES, and to look back on the first six months of #OARES.

First, the future: We have three more seminars planned for 2020: Andrew Stevens (Wisconsin) this Wednesday, Jonathan Colmer (UVA) on December 2, and Colette Salemi (Minnesota) on December 9. Then, we will be taking roughly six weeks off for the end of this semester, the holidays, and the start of next semester, and our first seminar will be Laura Schechter (Wisconsin) on January 21, 2021.

(Note the schedule change: Because I am teaching on Wednesdays in spring, we are changing the day–but not the time slot–for #OARES from Wednesday to Thursday.)

Second, looking at both past and future (i.e., confirmed) speakers, here are some descriptive statistics:

• Over 54 percent of speakers are women,
• Almost 89 percent of speakers are pre-tenure,*
• Over 43 percent of speakers are nonwhite, and
• Average attendance so far has been 78 attendees, including the speaker, Jeff, and me.**

For a seminar series that we launched to feature younger researchers as well as foster diversity and inclusion, I would say those are decent numbers, and I look forward to the next six months of #OARES. Also, given how successful it has been, it is my intention to keep the seminar going once normal life resumes post-COVID.

To those who have been attending, thank you for making this a success!

* This excludes USDA-ERS, IFPRI, and World Bank speakers.

** This excludes our Ask-the-Editors panel, which saw attendance shoot up to about 250.

I usually do not post links to those talks, but since I have received a number of emails about this, here is the video for last week’s meeting of the Online Agricultural and Resource Economics seminar. The panelists were Arun Agrawal (World Development), Jennifer Alix-Garcia (Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists), Amy Ando (American Journal of Agricultural Economics), Chris Barrett (Food Policy), and Mindy Mallory (Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy).

I am happy to share a leaner, meaner version of my paper with Jeff Bloem and Noah Wexler titled “The Paper of How: Estimating Treatment Effects with the Front-Door Criterion,” which we finished last week.

Here is the abstract:

We present the first application of Pearl’s (1995) front-door criterion to observational data wherein the required point-identification assumptions plausibly hold. For identification, the front-door criterion exploits exogenous mediator variables on the causal path. We estimate the effect of authorizing a shared Uber or Lyft ride on tipping by exploiting the plausibly exogenous variation in whether one actually shares a ride with a stranger conditional on authorizing sharing, on fare level, and on time-and-place fixed effects. We find that most of the observed negative effect on tipping is driven by selection. We then explore the consequences of violating the identification assumptions.

This version has benefited from comments from many people who were very generous with their time. We are grateful for any and all additional comments.