Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Here is the fifth of eight lectures I gave at the University of Copenhagen in May for a course title Causal Inference with Observational Data.

The difference between this and the other topics I covered in the class is that I have no first-hand experience doing RD. As such, those slides were first drafted by my PhD student Camilo Bohorquez-Peñuela, who gave the RD lecture as a guest lecturer in my doctoral applied econometrics class two years ago. Camilo has just defended his dissertation and is headed to the Central Bank of Colombia to work as a researcher there. Congratulations, Camilo!

Stay tuned for lectures 6 to 8 over the next few weeks, which will cover nonstandard dependent variables (Lecture 6) and various tricks of the trade (Lectures 7 and 8). The real payoff, for most readers of this blog, I suspect, will be in those last two lectures.

A few months ago, I wrote a post titled “What to Do Instead of ln(x+1),” in which I discussed the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation (IHS, or more specifically arcsinh), which is frequently used in lieu of the logarithmic transformation in order to transform a variable that has a substantial number of zero-valued observations.

The day the post appeared, I received an email from Casey Wichman, from Resources for the Future,* who wrote:

Jonathan Eyer and I used the IHS transformation in our JEEM paper on water scarcity and electricity generation, and I’ve actually been thinking about your final point since then. That is, how to account for elasticities when using the IHS transformation. I would be interested to do a bit more digging to see if anyone has written anything on it. If not (and I can’t remember finding anything when I was looking), I think there would be value in writing a short note … Any interest?

Last week, I had the honor of giving one of two keynote addresses in the closing plenary of the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Association.

Coming up through the ranks, one of the things I wished keynote presenters would do more often was to deliver proper keynote addresses rather than just showing up and presenting their paper du jour , my view being that a keynote is an occasion for one to gather one’s thoughts on a given topic.

Consequently, in my keynote, I gathered and presented my thoughts about where I think the research on contract farming and agricultural value chains should be going over the next few decades. If you are a graduate student looking for a research topic, it is my hope that those slides can provide some food for thought.

The other (proper!) keynote was given by Pol Antràs, from the Department of Economics at Harvard, who made a really interesting presentation about global value chains.