Cyrus Samii

Reporting the treated group mean along with DID estimates of the ATT cyrussamii.com?p=4151

The study uses an RCT "equivalency trial" approach, motivated by methodological and ethical concerns.

The study took place before the Taliban return to rule, but we think is relevant in the current context and in other crisis-affected settings.

Can Communities Take Charge? Testing Community-Based Governance to Sustain Schools in War-Affected Afghanistan | The Journal of Politics: Vol 0, No ja

New paper in first view @thejop.bsky.social w/ Burde, Middleton, and Rahnama

We show the promise of a community governance strategy to sustain schools in remote Afghan communities after NGO withdrawal.

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

What a great day: legends of innovation economics Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt win the Nobel. Joel was a PhD advisor of mine, so need a full article! Included: good & bad explanations of the Indus Rev, Aghion's charisma, influence of Jon Hughes, French fashion houses: kevinbryanecon.com/mokyraghionh...

Congrats to UZH.
One can read in terms of Hirschman’s Exit/Voice/Loyalty framework: the pull of sentimentality toward MIT is weak when there is abundant work to be done on global poverty and the broader home
environment is so bleak.

👀 (given the remarkable robustness of BART as a static prediction method)

Very well said. Re (2), a version of this is in the Korn and Graubard "Analysis of Health Surveys" textbook that explains how, under misspecification (and all models are somewhat misspecified), the weighted (population) fit is what we want rather than the sample fit.

Currently in FirstView: “Generalizing Trimming Bounds for Endogeneously Missing Outcome Data Using Random Forests." @cdsamii.bsky.social, Ye Wang, @jlzhou.bsky.social‬ present a partial identification approach that avoids strong assumptions. This is illustrated using a simulation and replication.

Agreed — nice round up of very well informed perspectives. I found Raleigh’s analysis especially convincing but all perspectives were thought provoking.

Back to teaching or studying economics at university this September?

@voxdev.bsky.social has tons of useful resources for university economics courses - I have included some examples in this thread. 1/n

Skepticism toward vax and modern medicine is fairly widespread publicly as I’ve seen, and is tied up with antipathy toward “experts” (“do your own research” a la Aaron Rodgers), which universities embody. There is the woke issue sure, but there is also antipathy toward expertise to contend with.

Let’s take the area where there has been the most heat: vaccinations. The MRNA vax researcher doesn’t need to change what they do. It’s a problem of educating the public that this is useful stuff. The question is how to do that effectively.

Seems that a field that has taken an especially large hit in the current context is biomedical sciences, and this because, it seems, MAGA rejected the expert guidance on COVID. These rules leave many unanswered questions for that field, no?

WE ARE HIRING! 2 Lecturers in Quantitative Social Science. Want a friendly interdisciplinary department in one of the world's most vibrant cities? This just might be for you.

Apply by: 10 Oct

www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

I agree with comments here emphasizing Trump’s vengeance on the “medical establishment” after feeling that it conspired during COVID to unseat him. Would be nice if nurses and doctors generated a groundswell of alarm in their personal social networks about the dangers.

Design-Based Uncertainty for Quasi-Experiments Design-based frameworks of uncertainty are frequently used in settings where the treatment is (conditionally) randomly assigned. This article develops a design-based framework suitable for analyzin...

Interesting paper on design-based uncertainty for quasi-experiments
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Montiel Olea has a few really nice papers on design from a decision theoretic perspective.

Anna Wilke and I have a paper (soon on Arxiv) that I can send on design diversification from minmax regret perspective. We were inspired by Manski and papers on experimental design like Banerjee et al. and Azevedo et al.

www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

Isn't this "generalization"?

(The tortured fit of a global polynomial)

Is He Baseball’s Most Brilliant Owner, or a Failure?

For your weekend read I highly recommend this article on the Tampa Bay Rays and the thankless pursuit of excellence:

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/m...

👀

*cited (not cute)

We had a wee contribution on this for randomized experiments (cute by Abadie et al.). The idea extends by analogy to observational studies: cyrussamii.com/wp-content/u...

One observes only a sample of the potential outcomes. Sampling error based standard errors provide for conservative inference for such uncertainty. Surprisingly, this was not widely known until fairly recently. (Cf the Abadie et al paper and refs therein.)

Data Science Frontiers:

🚨Call for submissions (by Aug 1)🚨
NYU "Data Science Frontiers: Society and Politics" conference. Held at NYU’s New York campus Oct 15-17. Submit a paper or extended abstract. Full details here: nyuad.my.salesforce-sites.com/NYEvents/ape...
Travel subsidies for presenters. Please forward!

Quantifying the impact of misinformation and vaccine-skeptical content on Facebook Low uptake of the COVID-19 vaccine in the US has been widely attributed to social media misinformation. To evaluate this claim, we introduce a framework combining lab experiments (total N = 18,725), c...

Then, I love this paper by Allen et al. although I suspect you have it already :-)

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

This paper uses observational data to extend results from a field experiment: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

The program with links to papers can be found at the link above.

Polmeth 2025 kicks off today at Emory. I’ll be presenting work on inference for group interaction experiments (eg, group training, experimental games, deliberation experiments, etc.) and coauthor Sandy Gordon will introduce our new data authentication tool, Data-NoMAD

polmeth.emory.edu/index.html