Marc F. Bellemare Posts

In late 2013, some colleagues and I applied for funding from the University of Minnesota’s Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute. Because of the name of the institute, we thought “People think of local and organic foods as healthy foods, and they think of an illness-free life as a healthy life, so why not look at the relationship between local and organic foods and food safety?”

So we submitted a proposal, and it got funded. It was a pretty small amount of money, as far as these things go–less then $5,000–and our research team eventually split along disciplinary fault lines. But because I could not look at the relationship between local and organic foods on one hand and food safety on the other hand in a way that was methodologically satisfactory to me, I chose to look instead at the relationship between farmers markets and food-borne illness.

Four years (and a New York Times op-ed) later, I am happy to note that my article titled “Farmers Markets and Food-Borne Illness,” coauthored with my former Master’s student Jenny Nguyen, is now published (gated; please email me for a copy) in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Wikipedia defines survivorship bias as

the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.

The concept of survivorship bias was new to me until a doctoral student with whom I am working on yet another paper on contract farming–the economic institution wherein a processing firm delegates the production of an agricultural commodity to grower households–brought it to my attention when we discussed Ton et al.’s (2018) excellent meta-analysis of the impacts of contract farming, in which the authors report that published estimates of the impacts of participation in contract farming on household welfare are “… upward biased because contract schemes that fail in the initial years are not covered by research.”

At first, I thought this was a pretty important empirical issue. But after thinking about it for a few days, survivorship bias struck me as only important for some applications, but not for others.

This is the title of my most recent article, which is forthcoming in Agricultural Economics and is already available online. Here is the abstract:

An important literature has established that participation in contract farming leads to higher incomes and has a number of other beneficial effects on the welfare of participating households. Yet no one has looked at the opportunity cost of and the various trade‐offs involved in participating in contract farming. I look at the relationship between participation in contract farming and income from (i) livestock, (ii) labor markets, (iii) nonfarm businesses, and (iv) agricultural sources other than livestock and contract farming and (v) unearned income. Using data from Madagascar, I find that participation in contract farming is associated with a 79% decrease in how much income per capita the average household derives from labor markets and a 47% decrease in how much income per capita it derives from nonfarm businesses, but also with a 51% increase in how much income per capita the average household derives from agricultural sources other than livestock and contract farming, possibly due to technological spillovers. Thus, even though contract farming has been shown to improve welfare in multiple ways in this context, it looks as though those gains come at the cost of an “agricultural involution” on the part of participating households, who seem to turn away from non‐agricultural activities. This has important implications for structural transformation narratives.

The above link is gated. If you cannot access the article but would like a copy, please email me.