Category: Economics
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A new (and better) coefficient stability test
Similar to many other applied microeconomists, I find myself using coefficient stability tests in nearly all my papers. Apparently, I am not unique. The methods developed by Altonji, Elder, and Taber (2005) and Oster (2019) have thousands of citations, many from top general interest and field journals. A new paper, by Paul Diegert, Matthew Masten,…
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Handbook Chapter on Agri-Food Value Chains in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
Last month my esteemed co-authors, Marc Bellemare and Sunghun Lim, and I published a chapter on agri-food value chains within low- and middle-income countries in volume six of the Handbook of Agricultural Economics. It was both a huge honor and a huge undertaking to write this chapter about such a rich and important literature. A…
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The OARES at 70: Reflections on Contributions to DEIB
The Online Agricultural and Resource Economics Seminar (OARES), which I co-organize with Marc Bellemare, has now facilitated 70 presentations. Starting in May 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns set in and in-person components of academic life stalled, the OARES has persisted for four semesters and one summer. Marc and I thought that it was time to pause…
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Have an ordinal dependent variable? Use this robustness test.
Ordinal variables are everywhere. Data providing information about happiness, levels of customer satisfaction, employees’ satisfaction, mental stress, psychological well-being, societal trust, and other important variables are now regularly collected and analyzed by national governments, large multinational companies, and researchers. However, because these data are not directly observable or quantitatively measurable, they are thus not measured…
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5-Star BBQ and the Challenge of Ordinal Scales
A few days ago a Twitter account representing tourism in Houston, posted the following Tweet. It shows analysis of BBQ restaurant reviews using a 5-star rating system. The results are… surprising… and some may even say laughable.
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“The Coronavirus Pandemic and Food Security: Evidence from Mali”—Forthcoming
My paper, co-authored with Guigonan Serge Adjognon and Aly Sanoh, on changes in experienced food security associated with the coronavirus pandemic is now forthcoming at Food Policy. In the paper, we combine pre-pandemic survey data with follow-up phone survey data from Mali, and find some interesting—and perhaps surprising—patterns in experienced food security within Mali. Here…
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Higher Aspirations, Less Investment? Some New Experimental Evidence
New research by David McKenzie, Aakash Mohpal, and Dean Yang finds that exogenously increased financial aspirations lead to less borrowing and business investments two years later. This finding is consistent with existing evidence, using observational data, of an inverted U-shaped relationship between the aspirations gap and ‘future oriented’ behavior such as investments (by me), education…
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“Aspirations and Investments in Rural Myanmar”—Forthcoming
In 2014, while I was completing my M.S. degree at MSU, I worked as a research assistant on a data collection project in Mon State Myanmar. As part of this work, I designed a module to be included in a larger household survey that aimed to measure the hopes and aspirations of respondents. That initial…
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“How Much Does the Cardinal Treatment of Ordinal Variables Matter?”—Forthcoming
I am very excited to share that my paper, “How Much Does the Cardinal Treatment of Ordinal Variables Matter? An Empirical Investigation” is now (finally) forthcoming in the journal Political Analysis. I wrote the first draft of this paper in my 2nd-year paper class at the University of Minnesota. So, publishing this paper in the…
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Testing and Correcting for Endogeneity with Discontinuities and No Exclusion Restriction
Applied microeconomists, like us, spend a lot of our time thinking (…erm… worrying) about the bias from endogeneity embedded in our empirical estimates. That is why the work of Carolina Caetano (and co-authors), in methodological papers published in Econometrica and the Journal of Econometrics seems so exciting to us.
Jeffrey R. Bloem 