Marc F. Bellemare Posts

As I write in the introduction to Doing Economics paraphrasing William Gibson, a lot of hidden-curriculum information is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. An exchange I had on Twitter this morning made me realize that a lot of people may not know how to write a good diversity statement. This is my effort to level the playing field along that dimension.

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Increasingly, universities and other institutions hiring researchers ask for personal statements about diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) from applicants in addition to cover letters, CVs, writing samples, letters of recommendation, teaching evaluations, and so on.

Having sat on search committees, I have seen all sorts of diversity statements, from the extremely bad to the very, very good. As someone who cares about all parts of DEIB, I worry that applicants from some universities are taught how to write a good diversity statement, whereas applicants from other universities are left to figure it out on their own.

So in the interest of leveling the playing field, I thought I would link to what is perhaps the best resource for writing diversity statements, namely UC Berkeley’s Office for Faculty Equity & Welfare’s “Rubric for Assessing Candidate Contributions to DEIB.” Why do I think this is the best resource? Because when I read applications, applicants from the UC system usually have the best DEI statements.

Specifically, that rubric assesses whether applicants discuss three distinct areas: “knowledge and understanding (section 1), track record of activities to date (section 2), and plans for contributing at Berkeley (section 3).”

Obviously, if you are not applying for a position at UC Berkeley, you will want to either skip the third section, or write it for the specific job you are applying for. For example, when I sat down to write my own diversity statement, it had two sections: (i) a discussion of my knowledge and understanding of DEIB, and (ii) my track record of activities contributing to DEIB to date.

The most important section of the webpage I linked to above is the sample rubric, which tells you exactly the kind of thing you should be discussing, and what counts as good versus what does not (make sure to check it out before writing your own statement; my screen capture leaves out a lot of information):

My article with Chris Boyd titled “Why Not Insure Prices? Experimental Evidence from Peru” is now out in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

If you are interested in any of micro-insurance (or “index” insurance), the consequences of price volatility and risk on producers, the impacts of agricultural insurance on producers, or even just in lab-in-the-field experiments with agricultural producers, you can access this article for free here until October 29, 2022.

There was a time when only a handful of restaurants would deliver in any given town. Growing up on the south shore of Montreal, the only things you could get delivered were no-frills foods like pizza, poutine, rotisserie chicken, or subs. And when a restaurant did deliver, that service was always offered by the restaurant itself.

Since I was a teenager in the early 1990s, the spread of information communication technologies (smartphones, in particular) has changed the food-delivery landscape radically. First, you can now get a wide array of foods delivered, from cheap chain-restaurant fast food to expensive meals from small independent restaurants. Second, instead of relying on in-house delivery people, most restaurants now rely on third-party services like Doordash, Grubhub, or UberEats. This has important consequences for the environment, labor markets, and nutrition, and these consequences have been amplified by the increased reliance on food-delivery services caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns.

What are the implications of the rise of food-delivery apps–what we refer to as the food-delivery revolution–for policy and research? This is the question my coauthors Eva-Marie Meemken, Tom Reardon, Carolina Vargas, and I tackle in an article in the latest issue of Science.

Here is the abstract:

Globally, consumers have increasingly been getting the meals they consume delivered by third parties such as Doordash, Grubhub, Wolt, or Uber Eats. This trend is attributable to broader changes in food systems and technological and institutional innovation (such as apps and digital platforms and the increased reliance on third parties for food delivery) and has sharply accelerated as a consequence of the lockdowns resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Global revenues for the online food delivery sector were about $90 billion in 2018, rose to $294 billion in 2021, and are expected to exceed $466 billion by 2026. The consequences and policy implications of this “delivery revolution” remain poorly understood but deserve greater attention. We offer an overview of the drivers of the revolution and discuss implications for the environment, nutrition, and decent work, as well as recently implemented and potential policy options to address those consequences.

In answering the question posed in the title of this post, my coauthors and I raise many questions of interest to agricultural, environmental, labor, tech, or urban economists. Given that, we hope this paper will launch a thousand ships.