Marc F. Bellemare Posts

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.

Today is the day after Labor Day in the US and Canada, which is the day the fall semester traditionally starts at the University of Minnesota.

Elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, universities have recently or soon will resume instruction, whether online or in person, which means that graduate programs in economics and related disciplines–agricultural and applied economics, business, political science, public policy, and so on–will be welcoming their new crop of graduate students.

Given the foregoing, I thought this was the ideal time to share a new working paper–a draft chapter from a forthcoming book–titled “How to Write Applied Papers in Economics.” This paper is meant to eliminate any guess-work in the paper-writing process for the new crop of graduate students as well as others.