Farmers Markets and Food-Borne Illness, Finally Finished

A little over a year ago, I published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Farmers Markets and Food-Borne Illness.”

That op-ed was based on the findings of a similarly titled working paper of mine, which one of the New York Times editors had gotten wind of after I first discussed it on this blog during the summer of 2015.

In my op-ed, however, I mentioned that I would soon post an updated version of our paper. But things got busy, and though I worked quite a bit on it here and there, I did not get to finish it until a few weeks ago.

(And by “finish,” I mean “stop working on it until it is returned to us with reviewer comments about how to improve it before it can get published.”)

Here is the new version. The major innovation is that we now exploit both the longitudinal nature of the data as well as a source of plausibly exogenous variation for the number of farmers markets in a given state in a given year. This obviously makes for much stronger results than we used to have. Here is the abstract of this latest version: