Thursday, April 28, 2011

Member Profiles: Brian E. Roe

Brian E. Roe
McCormick Professor of Agricultural Policy and Marketing
Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics, The Ohio State University

AAEA Activities:
  • Incoming AJAE Editor
  • AJAE Associate Editor
  • AEPP Editorial Board
  • Galbraith Forum and Award Committe
  • Nominating Committee
  • Best Dissertation Award Committee
  • Extension Section Board of Directors
  • Annual Meeting Selected Paper Topic Leader in Production Economics and Behavioral Economics

Brian E. Roe has worked broadly on marketing and policy issues in the agricultural and natural resource sectors. One key line of work, largely with Mario Teisl (University of Maine), focuses on consumer information disclosure. This work has bridged the area of marketing and policy in the realm of both agricultural products and products marketed as "eco-friendly." In this work, they have set forth general principles of effective labeling policies and completed numerous empirical studies investigating the efficacy of informative labeling for products with genetically modified ingredients, food safety risks, health claims, and environmental claims. Their work on the topic of information disclosure of residential electricity service attributes has influenced the environmental and price disclosure policies for deregulated residential electricity service in several states.

Brian has also worked on topics concerning of human nutrition, agricultural marketing, food safety policy, green energy demand, land use policy, contracting, and local food demand. For example, in the realm of human nutrition, his work with Sara Fein (FDA), Teisl, and Bidisha Mandal (Washington State University) documents the trade-offs new mothers make between breast feeding and returning to paid employment and the strategies used by mothers to juggle these key activities. This work has found a wide audience among labor economists, nutritionists, and public health practitioners and is currently informing policymakers who are revising federal public health goals.

Much of Brian's work involves collaborations with researchers from across the disciplinary spectrum (psychologists, sociologists, social workers, neuroscientists, geneticists, animal scientists). Indeed, when students have a research idea that doesn’t fit into a category, they often arrive on his doorstep looking for a kindred spirit and advice. Several of Brian's current projects include: understanding the risk aversion of U.S. farmers compared to reference groups like U.S. business owners; documenting how rehabilitation treatments provided to criminal offenders alter measurements of social preferences and recidivism rates; and documenting ambient quality differences in used equipment offerings between online and offline markets.


This post is part of an ongoing series of profiles of AAEA members. Have a suggestion for a future profile? Send them to Info@aaea.org.

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