Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
Right on time for conference season (e.g., CAES in Winnipeg next week, AAEA in New Orleans at the end of the month, and ICAE in Delhi in early August), here are the newly released Journal Citations Report, here is the new top 5 of journals in the “agricultural economics and policy” category:
In 2018, in the midst of the longest economic expansion in US history, national and international media outlets were citing commodity prices and financial stress as significant factors affecting the mental health of US farmers.
Most such stories drew parallels between then-current agricultural conditions and the conditions faced by farmers during the farm crisis of the 1980s, when 900 farmers died by suicide in response to farm debt doubling in the early 1980s. As a result, those same stories often emphasized farmer suicides and the unique set of risk factors associated with agriculture, noting that, between 2014 and 2018, 450 farmers had killed themselves.
My paper with Jeff Bloem (IFPRI) and Noah Wexler (UMN, Humphrey School) titled “The Paper of How: Estimating Treatment Effects with the Front-Door Criterion” is now published (and accessible free of charge, thanks to the University of Minnesota libraries covering open access) in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. You can access it here. Here is the abstract, followed by some miscellaneous thoughts about this research project: