In the election for President of the United States, the Electoral College is the body whose members vote to elect the President directly. Each state sends a number of delegates equal to its total number of representatives and senators in Congress; all but two states (Nebraska and Maine) assign electors pledged to the candidate that wins the state's plurality vote. We investigate the effect on presidential elections if states were to assign their electoral votes according to results in each congressional district,and conclude that the direct popular vote and the current electoral college are both substantially fairer compared to those alternatives where states would have divided their electoral votes by congressional district.
The simplicity and power of matching methods have made them an increasingly popular approach to causal inference in observational data. Existing theories that justify these techniques are well developed but either require exact matching, which is usually infeasible in practice, or sacrifice some simplicity via asymptotic theory, specialized bias corrections, and novel variance estimators; and extensions to approximate matching with multicategory treatments have not yet appeared. As an alternative, we show how conceptualizing continuous variables as having logical breakpoints (such as phase transitions when measuring temperature or high school or college degrees in years of education) is both natural substantively and can be used to simplify causal inference theory. The result is a finite sample theory that is widely applicable, simple to understand, and easy to implement by using matching to preprocess the data, after which one can use whatever method would have been applied without matching. The theoretical simplicity also allows for binary, multicategory, and continuous treatment variables from the start and for extensions to valid inference under imperfect treatment assignment.
``Robust standard errors'' are used in a vast array of scholarship across all fields of empirical political science and most other social science disciplines. The popularity of this procedure stems from the fact that estimators of certain quantities in some models can be consistently estimated even under particular types of misspecification; and although classical standard errors are inconsistent in these situations, robust standard errors can sometimes be consistent. However, in applications where misspecification is bad enough to make classical and robust standard errors diverge, assuming that misspecification is nevertheless not so bad as to bias everything else requires considerable optimism. And even if the optimism is warranted, we show that settling for a misspecified model (even with robust standard errors) can be a big mistake, in that all but a few quantities of interest will be impossible to estimate (or simulate) from the model without bias. We suggest a different practice: Recognize that differences between robust and classical standard errors are like canaries in the coal mine, providing clear indications that your model is misspecified and your inferences are likely biased. At that point, it is often straightforward to use some of the numerous and venerable model checking diagnostics to locate the source of the problem, and then modern approaches to choosing a better model. With a variety of real examples, we demonstrate that following these procedures can drastically reduce biases, improve statistical inferences, and change substantive conclusions.
The financial viability of Social Security, the single largest U.S. Government program, depends on accurate forecasts of the solvency of its intergenerational trust fund. We begin by detailing information necessary for replicating the Social Security Administration’s (SSA’s) forecasting procedures, which until now has been unavailable in the public domain. We then offer a way to improve the quality of these procedures due to age-and sex-specific mortality forecasts. The most recent SSA mortality forecasts were based on the best available technology at the time, which was a combination of linear extrapolation and qualitative judgments. Unfortunately, linear extrapolation excludes known risk factors and is inconsistent with long-standing demographic patterns such as the smoothness of age profiles. Modern statistical methods typically outperform even the best qualitative judgments in these contexts. We show how to use such methods here, enabling researchers to forecast using far more information, such as the known risk factors of smoking and obesity and known demographic patterns. Including this extra information makes a sub¬stantial difference: For example, by only improving mortality forecasting methods, we predict three fewer years of net surplus, $730 billion less in Social Security trust funds, and program costs that are 0.66% greater of projected taxable payroll compared to SSA projections by 2031. More important than specific numerical estimates are the advantages of transparency, replicability, reduction of uncertainty, and what may be the resulting lower vulnerability to the politicization of program forecasts. In addition, by offering with this paper software and detailed replication information, we hope to marshal the efforts of the research community to include ever more informative inputs and to continue to reduce the uncertainties in Social Security forecasts.
This work builds on our article that provides forecasts of US Mortality rates (see King and Soneji, The Future of Death in America), a book developing improved methods for forecasting mortality (Girosi and King, Demographic Forecasting), all data we used (King and Soneji, replication data sets), and open source software that implements the methods (Girosi and King, YourCast). Also available is a New York Times Op-Ed based on this work (King and Soneji, Social Security: It’s Worse Than You Think), and a replication data set for the Op-Ed (King and Soneji, replication data set).
