Marc Bellemare

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.

Born in Montreal in 1976, Marc got his B.Sc. degree from the Université de Montréal in 1999. As an undergraduate, Marc worked as a journalist, starting at a small local newspaper during his freshman year to ultimately serve as editor in chief of Quartier Libre, the student newspaper of the Université de Montréal, during his senior year.

After getting his M.Sc. in economics from the Université de Montréal in 2001, Marc worked at the International Fund for Agricultural Development in Rome before getting his Ph.D. in applied economics from Cornell's Dyson School of Applied Economic and Management in 2006.

Though he was initially trained as a development economist, Marc's research focuses on agricultural economics and policy broadly defined as well as on applied econometrics. His best-known contributions are on topics as varied as the use of the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation in applied econometrics, the relationship between food prices on social unrest, the use lagged variables for causal inference, the welfare impacts of participation in contract farming, the measurement of food waste, and the impacts of commodity price volatility on rural households.

For his research, Marc 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 Award 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 Guardian, the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the Washington Post, and he has had bylines in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

From 2018 to 2021, Marc served on the Board of Directors of the AAEA. He also has the rare distinction of having edited the top two journals in agricultural economics and policy. He served as one of four co-editors of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics from 2020 to 2023. Prior to that, he had served as one of two co-editors of Food Policy from 2015 to 2019.

For his teaching, Marc won the University of Minnesota's College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences' Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate Faculty in 2018. In 2022, he won the University of Minnesota's Award for Outstanding Contribution to Graduate and Professional Education and was inducted in the University of Minnesota's Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

In May 2022, Marc published Doing Economics: What You Should Have Learned in Grad School—But Didn't, his first book, with MIT Press.

For his research, teaching, and service contributions to the agricultural economics profession, Marc was elected Fellow of the AAEA in 2023.

Marc lives in Saint Paul, MN., with his wife Janet and daughter Sophia.