Marc F. Bellemare Posts

One of our PhD student, whose work focuses on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, writes:

I would like your opinion on something. When I presented this [paper] in the past, I have received requests to include more background slides and information on SNAP (history, participation rates, eligibility rules, etc.), the poverty line (how it is calculated, etc.), as well as diff-in-diffs (parallel trends). I did not have these details included as I thought most people know this stuff but that was obviously not the case for a few people who saw me present the paper in the past. Yesterday, however, I have received some feedback about that information being redundant. This is not my job-market paper, but as I prepare for job-market talks, what do you suggest I do? Include background on the more common concepts and methods or skip them? Do you have some general advice in deciding how much of that to include?

It’s been a while since I wrote a post for this series, so I thought I should discuss overcontrolling.

Two of our doctoral students are working together on an article in which they are interested in the effect of a spike in the price of a staple food on the welfare of consumers. The staple they are looking at is primarily sold at two types of retail outlets, let’s call them A and B (Because I did not consult with the students before writing this post, I am remaining purposely vague about the application).

In principle, then, the students are interested in identifying the causal effect of a change in the price of the staple at retailers of type A and the causal effect of a change in the price of the staple at retailers of type B. Let’s denote those prices as [math]p_A[/math] and [math]p_B[/math]. Letting [math]y[/math] denote welfare, the students are interested in the effect of [math]p_A[/math] on [math]y[/math] and on the effect of [math]p_B[/math] on [math]y[/math].

Initially, they estimated the following equation

(1) [math]y = \alpha + \beta_A p_A + \beta_B p_B + \epsilon[/math],

(Note: This post has a lot of inside baseball about the agricultural and applied economics profession. If you tend to read this blog for the econometrics post, it is safe to skip this post and wait for the next installment of ‘Metrics Monday, which will hopefully be posted next week.)

After my last post, in which I announced that I was running for the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s (AAEA) Board of Directors, a colleague sent me the following on Twitter, via direct message:

I was interested also to hear your thoughts on all of the gender issues that have been swirling in the economics field and how you think they are similar/contrast with what we have in AAEA world. You didn’t bring these challenges to the field up at all in your blog post. Do you know if these trends are similar/different? Given how big an issue this has been over the last year, I think it would be good for people to hear your thoughts on it as a potential member of the AAEA board.