And then the other shoe dropped: Last week, UM announced that new pledges and donations in December — a key month for university fundraising — fell $6 million, a decrease of roughly 31 percent. Only the Columbia branch, where the protests took place, suffered these losses. No other UM branch experienced declines.
IES training on RCTs
I attended this several years ago, and it was one of the best training experiences I’ve had:
You will learn about much more than just RCTs.
Workshop on multilevel causal inference
With Raudenbush and Bryk at Stanford. I’m taking it right now, here is the agenda:
It sounds like they will be teaching it in the future.
Compelling evidence that broken windows theory of crime is true
What is “broken windows“? The broken windows theory is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The theory states that maintaining and monitoring urban environments to prevent small crimes such as vandalism, public drinking and toll-jumping helps to create an atmosphere of order and...
I have no choice but to reject the validity of the scientific method
Are the benefits of moderate drinking a myth? A full review of the relevant epidemiological literature on moderate drinking is beyond the scope of this document. However, an initial scan leaves me reasonably confident that tax increases save lives in the long run too. The reasons: No randomized trials have checked on the benefits of moderate drinking (Holmes et al. 2014, p. 4). The belief in such...
Does Religion Affect Economic Growth and Happiness? Evidence from Ramadan
Interesting paper, especially the results. We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of daily fasting due to the interaction between the rotating Islamic calendar and a country’s latitude. We report two key, quantitatively meaningful...
Workshop on quasi-experimental methods with Cook and Shadish
A workshop on better quasi-experimental design and analysis will take place at Northwestern University from Monday, August 3rd to Friday, August 14th. The workshop is for faculty from all disciplines who have an interest in causal research in education, though some advanced graduate students working with quasi-experimental data are also welcome. This two-week workshop will expose attendees to the...
2015 Northwestern-Duke Causal Inference Workshops
From my email: Northwestern University and Duke University are holding two workshops on Research Design for Causal Inference this year. They will run back-to-back at Northwestern Law School in downtown Chicago. We invite you to attend either or both. Apologies for the length of this message. Main workshop: Monday – Friday, July 13-17, 2015 Advanced workshop: Sunday-Wednesday, July 19-22...
Intro to geographic regression discontinuity designs
In the latest issue of Political Analysis: Political scientists often turn to natural experiments to draw causal inferences with observational data. Recently, the regression discontinuity design (RD) has become a popular type of natural experiment due to its relatively weak assumptions. We study a special type of regression discontinuity design where the discontinuity in treatment assignment is...
Angrist and Pischke new book on causal inference
Sounds like Mostly Harmless minus the matrix algebra: “People are constantly looking at the world around them and trying to learn from it, and that’s natural,” MIT economist Joshua Angrist says. “But it turns out to be very difficult to sort out cause and effect, because the world is complicated, with many things happening at once.” Angrist, the Ford Professor of Economics, has long been one of...