Marc F. Bellemare Posts

I have been thinking about writing a post on nonlinear relationships ever since my colleague Jason Kerwin mentioned the Stata command -utest- at one of our development seminars.

Prior to this week’s ‘Metrics Monday, I had last posted on March 23 about my new working paper with Johanna Fajardo-Gonzalez and Seth Gitter on the welfare impacts of rising quinoa prices.

Since then, I have criss-crossed the North American continent, presenting my work in New York, Minnesota, Alberta, and New Mexico, which means that I have had no time to blog until Monday morning.

Since I discussed our quinoa paper, however, there has been quite a bit of media interest in our findings. Here is a brief roundup of the most interesting media stories (the other stories I saw were written by people whom I did not actually speak to, and often their stories were just reprising details from the two stories I discuss below).

First, there was this story by Brad Plumer on Vox:

Last month, Ben Chapman and Don Schaffner, who host the Food Safety Talk podcast, discussed my January Gray Matter column in the New York Times in January, in which I discussed my work on farmers markets and food-borne illness.

Their discussion was even-handed, and Don (I think it was him; I listened to the segment only once, over a month ago) demonstrated a surprising understanding of the working paper culture in economics, wherein we circulate working papers well ahead of submitting for publication so as to make our work better in view of publishing it in better journals. But the one part which made my ears perk up was when Ben asked Don (or the other way around; again, it’s been a while since I listened) why my coauthors and I had looked at the relationship between farmers markets and all those seemingly irrelevant illnesses, and Don said (and I’m paraphrasing), “I don’t know, it looks like data mining.”