The US Midwest, home to over 20 percent of Americans, depends heavily on agriculture. Bellemare looks 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, he looks at crude or age-adjusted all-cause death rates. Commodity prices are only available at the state or global level, so he interacts (i) state-level or global commodity prices with (ii) how much of each commodity is grown within each county. Bellemare’s 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, he combines 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, he estimates specifications in which he instruments revenues from each commodity with measures of drought severity, and he conducts falsification tests.
Bio:
Marc F. Bellemare is McKnight Presidential Chair in Applied Economics, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, Distinguished University Teaching Professor, and Northrop Professor at the University of Minnesota. From January 2020 to December 2023, he served as one of four co-editors of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Prior to that, he served as one of two co-editors of Food Policy from 2015 to 2019.
His research focuses on agricultural economics, applied econometrics, and food policy. 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. In early 2023, he was elected Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. His work so far been featured in media outlets such as The Economist, The Guardian, the New York Times, National Public Radio, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.