Presentations

This talk summarizes a paper -- Gary King and Richard Nielsen. 2015. “Why Propensity Scores Should Not Be Used for Matching” -- with this abstract: Researchers use propensity score matching (PSM) as a data preprocessing step to selectively prune units prior to applying a model to estimate a causal effect. The goal of PSM is to reduce imbalance in the chosen pre-treatment covariates between the treated and control groups...

This talk explains how to make matching methods for causal inference easier to use and more powerful. Applied researchers commonly use matching methods as a data preprocessing step for reducing model dependence and bias, after which they use whatever statistical procedure they would have without matching, such as regression. They routinely ignore the requirement that all matches be exact, and also commonly use ad hoc analyses that iterate between formal matching methods and informal balance and sample size checks. The talk describes 3 papers which (1) offer the first comprehensive...

This talk explains how to make matching methods for causal inference easier to use and more powerful. Applied researchers commonly use matching methods as a data preprocessing step for reducing model dependence and bias, after which they use whatever statistical procedure they would have without matching, such as regression. They routinely ignore the requirement that all matches be exact, and also commonly use ad hoc analyses that iterate between formal matching methods and informal balance and sample size checks. The talk describes 3 papers which (1) offer the first comprehensive...

Chinese government censorship of social media constitutes the largest selective suppression of human communication in recorded history. In three ways, we show, paradoxically, that this large system also leaves large footprints that reveal a great deal about itself and the intentions of the government. First is an observational study where we download all social media posts before the Chinese government can read and censor those they deem objectionable, and then detect from a network of computers all over the world which are censored. Second, we conduct...