Each semester, the UF/IFAS Food and Resource Economics Department curates a dynamic seminar series featuring leading agricultural and applied economics scholars. These seminars are designed to inform, engage, and inspire our colleagues at the University of Florida.
We are excited to announce that our next seminar of the semester will take place on Friday, October 25, 2024, at 10:30 a.m. EST and will feature Dr. Marc Bellemare, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Distinguished University Teaching Professor, and Northrop Professor in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, where he also directs the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy.
These seminars are open to all interested in attending in person or online via Zoom.
Event Details
When: Friday, October 25, 2024, at 10:30 a.m. EST
Where: McCarty Hall A 1151 or attend online via Zoom
Presentation Title: Commodity Prices and Mortality
Abstract: The US Midwest, home to over 20 percent of Americans, depends heavily on agriculture. We look at the relationship between commodity prices—corn and soybean prices, the dominant commodities in the Midwest—and mortality in a sample of 485 Midwestern counties for the period 1980 to 2016. As outcome variables, we look at crude or age-adjusted all-cause death rates. Commodity prices are only available at the state or global level, so we interact (i) state-level or global commodity prices with (ii) how much of each commodity is grown within each county. Our treatment variable thus captures how, for each commodity, revenues from that commodity within a given county change in response to changes in commodity prices. For identification, we combine the exposure design just described with a two-way, county and year fixed effects design as well as with several robust panel data estimators. On average, a decrease in commodity prices is associated with increased mortality across all counties: A 10-percent decrease in either corn or soybean revenues is associated with an increase in the crude death rate of about 0.2 percent, or 0.205 additional deaths per 1,000 persons in a county, a result driven by rural counties and seemingly mediated by cardiovascular disease and suicides. For robustness, we estimate specifications in which we instrument revenues from each commodity with measures of drought severity, and we conduct falsification tests.
About the Speaker: Marc F. Bellemare is Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Distinguished University Teaching Professor, and Northrop Professor in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota, where he also directs the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy. Marc served as one of four co-editors of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics from January 2020 to December 2023. Prior to that, he served as one of two co-editors of Food Policy from 2015 to 2019. For his research, he has won the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association’s (AAEA) Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2007, the AAEA’s Outstanding American Journal of Agricultural Economics Article award in 2011, and the AAEA’s Quality of Research Discovery awards in 2014. That same year, he also won the European Association of Agricultural Economists‘ Quality of Research Discovery Award. His research has been featured in media outlets such as The Economist, the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the Wall Street Journal. In early 2023, he was elected Fellow of the AAEA.
For more information and Zoom link, visit our website at https://fred.ifas.ufl.edu/seminar-series/ or email Dr. Di Fang, seminar coordinator at difang@ufl.edu
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