Isaac Opper

@jessebruhn.bsky.social, Sai, and I are almost done with a paper that jointly estimates teacher VA and school VA. We're finding (in NC) school test effects of about .08 student SDs and that ~30% of that is due to variation in avg. teacher quality across schools.

This situation is so so sad. But I've finally remembered that doing something, however small it seems, is better than doing nothing. I set up a recurring donation and would encourage others to consider doing so as well.

Miami clergy raise concerns as Trump tours Florida's 'Alligator Alcatraz' - Catholic Review Most Americans agree on the need for good U.S. border security, but to hear politicians and civil authorities hurl insults and jokes at the expense of migrants as Florida opened its new "Alligator Alc...

Miami, FL Catholic priest Father Federico Capdepón: “To have this Alligator Alcatraz is a very sinful initiative — to say nobody can escape because the gators are around is very sinful.”
catholicreview.org/miami-clergy...

like the old joke about being a liberal when you're young and a conservative when you're old:

"if you didn't have trump derangement syndrome in the first admin, you have no heart; if you didn't have trump derangement syndrome in the second admin, you have no brain"

obviously this is terrible for democracy and the rule of law in America

but I'm also offended on behalf of the prisoner's dilemma

this from a representative at American Institutes for Research about DOGE/Trump cancelling IES contracts is spot on (& good on them for speaking out clearly about this)

Step 1: Don’t doom on the timeline.
Step 2: Don’t doom at all.
Step 3: Do things. Small things count.
Step 4: Repeat forever.

This is both exhausting and liberating.

LA fires are a good reminder that the only difference between me and any refugee is luck.

Economist, GS-0110-13, FPL: GS-13 (Direct Hire) <p>This position is in the immediate Office of the Under Secretary (OUS), located in Washington, DC. OUS assists the Secretary in the discharge of Secretarial duties and responsibilities, focusing&nbs...

The US Dept of Ed is looking to hire an Economist as a career position at the GS-13 level. The deadline is in 3 days!

Could be a great opportunity (and happy to tell you more from my time interacting with that team).

www.usajobs.gov/job/825004800

It's not quite that, but I believe Bruce Sacerdote has a study using random adoption matching to get at it a bit.

"You either play hide and seek with me now, or pay for my psychologist in 5 years. Your choice daddy."

Isn't "fucking around at margins" more or less the definition of economics?

(Also, stop trying to guilt me to spend more time with my kids. They're good enough at that on their own, thank you very much.)

It's not just a question of "which matters more" from a causal inference sense but also "which can we use public policy to improve," no?

I've always wanted to meet the magical whiskey fairy. I'm ashamed to admit that I even started to doubt whether she actually existed, but you've given me hope Jesse.

I think a big part of it is that it's really hard to separate teacher effects from school effects, which you need to do if you really want to understand sorting. I'm working on a paper that tries to do that, in part to answer the sorting question, but it's a tricky empirical question.

4/ What makes me most excited about this work is that I think it can also be a useful building block for estimating effects in other complicated settings, such as averaging RCT and non-RCT estimates, RDs, judge IVs, etc.

So definitely let me know what you think of it, good or bad!

3/ Even more interesting, it turns out we can decompose the resulting posterior variance into that generated by traditional statistical uncertainty vs extrapolation uncertainty.

Much to my surprise, even in the huge Oregon Medicaid experience the statistical uncertainty seems to dominate.

2/ The basic idea is that by adding a Bayesian hierarchical model to traditional econometric models of selection, we can generate estimates/CIs of the ATE (or other estimands) that capture uncertainty in both the true values of the observed moments and uncertainty in how to extrapolate from these.

From LATE to ATE: A Bayesian approach We develop a Bayesian model that produces a posterior distribution of the marginal treatment effect (MTE) function. The method provides researchers wi…

1/ Want to estimate the average effect of a treatment rather than restricting your estimate to the compliers?

My paper just out in the Journal of Econometrics gives you another tool, with an R package available on GitHub!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Isn't it partly a question of what you hold fixed and what is considered random when thinking about inference? E.g. if the size of spillovers depends on who is grouped, then it depends on treatment assignment and so cluster? If not, then they're fixed and so you don't need to cluster?

In Baghdad in 2008 some of the most squared away patrols I ever went on were lead by female MPs (another victory for the roy model #EconSky).

Women have been in combat jobs (formally / informally) for 20 years now and we still have the greatest military on earth. Why would anyone want to go back?

Oh wow, I hadn't even heard that!

See there's the difference between us: unlike you, I haven't gotten a grant in a while, but this was 100% me after putting my toddler to bed last night.

And written by some of the kindest people out there!

Any chance you could add me? Thanks Josh!