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    Gosnell Prize nominations

    And while we're doing announcements, the Society for Political Methodology is also soliciting nominations for the Gosnell Prize, awarded to the best paper in methods presented at any political science conference:

    The Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology is awarded for the best work in political methodology presented at any political science conference during the preceding year, 1 June 2006-31 May 2007.

    The Award Committee also includes Michael Crespin and Patrick Brandt.

    We look forward to submissions for this important award in the next few...

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    Gosnell Prize Winner

    Congratulations to the 2007 Gosnell Prize winners - Harvard's very own Alberto Abadie, Alexis Diamond, and Jens Hainmueller! They won for their paper "Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California's Tobacco Control Program", which was presented at this year's MPSA conference in Chicago. We saw an earlier version of the paper this past semester at the Applied Stats workshop, and I have to say,...

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    Government as API provider

    The authors of "Government Data and the Invisible Hand" provide some interesting advice about how the next president can make the government more transparent:

    If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a...
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    Greiner on "Exit Polling and Racial Bloc Voting"

    Please join us at the Applied Statistics workshop this Wednesday, November 18th at 12 noon when we will be happy to have Jim Greiner of the Harvard Law School presenting on "Exit Polling and Racial Bloc Voting: Combining Individual-Level and R x C Ecological Data." Jim has provided a companion paper with the following abstract:


    Despite its shortcomings, cross-level or ecological inference remains a...
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    Grimmer on "Quantitative Discovery from Qualitative Information"


    Please join us tomorrow, September 9th for our first workshop of the year when we are happy to have Justin Grimmer presenting joint work with Gary King entitled "Quantitative Discovery from Qualitative Information: A General-Purpose Document Clustering Methodology."

    Justin and Gary have provided the following abstract for their paper:

    Many people attempt to discover useful information by reading large quantities of unstructured text, but because of known human limitations even experts are ill-suited...
    Read more about Grimmer on "Quantitative Discovery from Qualitative Information"

    (not) growing up to be a lawyer

    I went to law school before I ended up as a graduate student, so I read with some interest a recent essay by Vanderbilt Law Professor Herwig Schlunk entitled "Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be...lawyers" (an online version is at the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog).

    Maybe the title gives it all away, but the gist is that a legal education might not always pay off. While I wholeheartedly agree with this, I'm less enthusiastic about the author's methodology...

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    Guest Post by Patrick Lam on "Estimating Individual Causal Effects"

    Last week, I gave the applied statistics talk at IQSS on some of my research on estimating individual causal effects. Since there was some interest from folks who could not attend, I thought I would give a brief overview of my argument and research.

    In the majority of empirical research, the quantity of interest is likely to be some type of average treatment effect, either through a regression model or some other clever research design. For example, we often run a regression of an outcome Y on some treatment W and covariates X and interpret the beta coefficient on W as the "...

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    Guest post: Politics kills!

    A guest post from Marc Alexander of Harvard's Gov department, who blogs at Politics and Health:

    Politics kills! A new study on traffic fatalities on the election day...

    A brilliant research report published in the Oct 2 issue of JAMA found that driving fatalities increase significantly on the election day in the US. Redelmeier from U of Toronto and Robert Tibshirani from Stanford found that the hazard of being hurt or dying in a traffic accident rises on the day of the Presidential election. While the...

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    Hainmueller in the New York Times

    Jens Hainmueller, Assistant Professor at MIT and former writer for this very blog, has had some of his research written up in the New York Times today:

    "Americans, whether they are rich or poor, are much more in favor of high-skilled immigrants," said Jens Hainmueller, a political scientist at M.I.T. and co-author of a survey of attitudes toward immigration with Michael J. Hiscox, professor of government at Harvard. The survey of 1,600 adults, which examined the...
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    Happy Holidays?

    This morning the New York Times alerted me to a Science piece written by two economists working on measuring happiness. Their basic finding is that objective measures of quality of life (nice climate, etc) are pretty highly correlated with subjective, self-reported measures of how satisfied people are with their lives. They provide a ranking of US states by happiness level, accessible...

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    Harding on "A Bayesian Mixed Logit-Probit Model for Multinomial Choice"

    This Wednesday the Applied Statistics Workshop will welcome Matthew Harding, Dept. of Economics, Stanford University. Matthew will be presenting his research, "A Bayesian Mixed Logit-Probit Model for Multinomial Choice", a project that is joint with Jerry Hausman and Martin Burda. Here is an abstract for the presentation:

    In this paper we introduce a new flexible mixed model for multinomial discrete choice where the key individual- and alternative-specific parameters of interest are allowed to follow an assumption-free nonparametric density specification while other alternative-...

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    Harvard University Faculty Position in Quantitative Political Methodology, Tenure-Track Level

    The Department of Government invites applications for a position in quantitative political methodology at the rank of Assistant or untenured Associate Professor to begin July 1, 2006.   Candidates should expect to have completed the requirements for the Ph.D. prior to appointment. Teaching duties will include offering courses at undergraduate and graduate levels. Candidates are expected to demonstrate a promise of excellence both in research and teaching in political methodology. Harvard is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer; applications from women and minority...

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    Health Inequalities and Anchoring Vignettes

    I have earlier written about using anchoring vignetttes to correct for biases in self-reported measures such as health outcomes (here and here). One issue with self-reports is that respondents may interpret identical questions in different ways. The idea of vignettes is use controlled scenarios to measure this bias and adjust the self-reports accordingly, so that they are...

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    Hopkins on "Making Credible Inferences about the Effects of Local Contexts"

    Please join us this Wednesday when Dan Hopkins, Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University (and soon to be Assistant Professor at Georgetown), will present "Making Credible Inferences about the Effects of Local Contexts". Dan provided the following abstract for his presentation:

    In the last decade, there has been an explosion of social science research exploring the influence of local contexts on attitudes and behavior. Yet such studies face methodological hurdles, including the endogeneity of individuals' moving decisions, significant measurement error, and ambiguity...
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