Marc F. Bellemare Posts

It is always nice to wake up to an email saying one of your papers has been accepted for publication. As the title indicates, my article with Chris Boyd Leon titled “Why Not Insure Prices? Experimental Evidence from Peru” is now forthcoming at the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

You can find the most recent version of this paper here, and here is the abstract:

In a competitive market, a profit-maximizing producer’s total revenue is determined both by the quantity of output she chooses to produce and by the price at which she can sell that output. Of these two variables, only output is in part or wholly within the producer’s control, price being entirely determined by market forces. Given that, it is puzzling that the literature studying the effects of providing insurance to producers in low- and middle-income countries has ignored price risk entirely, focusing instead on insuring output. We run an artefactual lab-in-the-field experiment in Peru to look at the effects of insurance against output price risk on production. We randomize the order of three games: (i) a baseline game in which price risk is introduced at random, (ii) the baseline game to which we add mandatory insurance against price risk sold at an actuarially fair premium, and (iii) the baseline game to which we add voluntary insurance against price risk sold at the actuarially fair premium, but for which we offer a random 0-, 50- or 100-percent discount to exogenize take-up. Our results show that, on average, (i) price risk does not significantly change production relative to price certainty and (ii) neither does the provision of compulsory insurance against price risk, but the introduction of voluntary price risk (iii) causes the average producer on the market to produce more in situations of price risk than in situations of price certainty, and (iv) causes the average producer on the market to produce more in situations of price certainty than in cases where there is no insurance or where insurance is mandatory. When looking only at situations where there is price risk, (v) this is due almost entirely to the insurance rather than to selection into purchasing the insurance. Our findings further suggest that (vi) even in the absence of the discount, the insurance against price risk would have a large (i.e., 70-percent) take-up rate.

It also feels great to be back to writing journal articles after writing a book and a Handbook of Agricultural Economics chapter back to back!

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Peter Lorentzen, professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, about Doing Economics for the New Books Network podcast.

Afterwards, I remarked to Peter, whom you can follow on Twitter here, that these were the best questions I had had on the book so far. Here is a link to our 40-minute conversation, during which we cover a lot of ground about the economics profession. Peter also has interviews with John List, Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan, as well as Mike Munger about their new books.

A few weeks ago I tweeted out that I had (re)discovered the Freedom app, and that it had allowed me to do a tremendous amount of work in the span of a few days.

If you are not familiar with it, Freedom allows blocking off distractions on your computer, phone, or tablet–or any combination of those things at once.

After reading Cal Newport’s Deep Work when it came out in 2016, I had used Freedom for a time. Back then, however, it was an all-or-nothing proposition: You either blocked off your Internet altogether, or you did not. But for a lot of what I do, I need to be able to access things like Overleaf, Google Scholar, and various other web resources,* so that a blanket ban on any and all apps and websites ended up being counterproductive.

Enter the new and improved Freedom, which allows to select what you block off for a designated amount of time. In my case, my most common distractions are Twitter, email, and news sites, so that is what I block off. The beauty of Freedom is that you can call up a session that blocks off all those things on more than one device. In my case, that would be my computer and my phone, so that when I sit at my desk, the only thing I can do is work.

After tweeting out about my rediscovery of the Freedom app, they asked me whether they could interview me about my work habits for their blog. Since this is neither about my book nor my research, I thought it would be fun to answer their questions. Here is the full interview.

* Here is Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage, my favorite such resource, in case you have never seen it.