Marc F. Bellemare Posts

In the capharnaum leading to the start of the fall semester, I had somehow lost sight of the idea of posting the newest version of my paper with Casey Wichman in which we derive elasticities for regressions involving the inverse hyperbolic sine (IHS) transformation.

Here it is. The results haven’t changed much, but this version is considerably better, and we are grateful to those who have read the first version. Here is the abstract:

I spent Monday of last week in Rome to talk about food waste with policy makers and a handful of other researchers who have worked on the topic. As I sat there, one thing occurred to me about the work I have done on the topic with my Minnesota colleagues which in retrospect, I really wish we had had the presence of mind to include in the paper.

When it comes to food waste, the world is split into two categories: 1. Those who think food waste is a huge problem which policy makers have to tackle, and 2. Those who think food waste is likely a problem, but one that is nowhere near as important as those in category 1 would have you believe.

Given the work I have done on the topic, I fall squarely in category 2. Recall that my work on the topic (link opens a .pdf) says that the quantity of food waste is vastly overstated because of the definitions used. Worse, my work says that the value of food waste is even more overstated because it multiplies the aforementioned overstated quantity by retail prices when, in fact, food items are often wasted well before the retail stage.

Both articles are by me and a coauthor. The first article (gated; email me for a copy) is a review of the economics literature on contract farming, in which Jeff Bloem and I look at whether participation in contract farming and agricultural value chains improves welfare. On the basis of the literature, our answer is “Most likely, but it’s hard to know for sure.”

Here is the abstract: