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...
Understanding variation in treatment effects in education
A new report issued by IES: A key purpose of rigorous evaluations of education programs and interventions is to inform policy choices. Typically, such assessments focus on the overall or average treatment effect of the intervention on key outcomes. However, there are also important program and policy questions that pertain to variation in treatment effects across subgroups of study participants...
Illustrations of spurious correlations
Great website:
New – Journal of Observational Studies
A new open-access journal dedicated to observational studies. Normally I am dubious of new journals, until I looked at the ed board: Imbens, Imai, Cook, and bunch of other rock stars. Looks to be a good journal: There are several journals that deal with observational studies in specific fields, but this is the first journal that is devoted to observational studies across the wide range of fields...