Marc F. Bellemare Posts

I spent the last week in Vail, CO at the Agricultural and Applied Economics’ (AAEA) 2017 Early Career Professionals Workshop where, at the request of AAEA president Jayson Lusk, I talked about research and publishing.

My slides for that talk, titled “How to Publish in Academic Journals,” are here. This is obviously geared toward people interested in publishing in top agricultural and applied economics journals, but there are some things in there that apply generally to almost all if not all economists.

My talk in Vail was an updated version of a talk I had given in Minneapolis at the 2014 annual meetings of the AAEA.

This has been a busy last few weeks given work-related travel, so here is a quick ‘Metrics Monday post.

I have blogged about this paper a number of times, but my article with Taka Masaki and Tom Pepinsky titled “Lagged Explanatory Variables and the Estimation of Causal Effect” is finally published in the Journal of Politics. You can find an ungated version here.

Here is the abstract:

It’s rare that I can combine my two primary interests–applied econometrics and food policy–in one post, and I am particularly happy to be able to do just that with this post.

In 2014, Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian published an article in the American Economic Review where they purportedly showed that US food aid deliveries caused conflict in recipient countries. Here is the abstract of their article:

We study the effect of US food aid on conflict in recipient countries. Our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in U.S. wheat production and cross-sectional variation in a country’s tendency to receive any U.S. food aid. According to our estimates, an increase in U.S. food aid increases the incidence and duration of civil conflicts, but has no robust effect on inter-state conflicts or the onset of civil conflicts. We also provide suggestive evidence that the effects are most pronounced in countries with a recent history of civil conflict.

Specifically, Nunn and Qian estimate the following two-stage least squares specification: