Abstract: Colonial powers typically organized economic activity in the colonies to maximize their economic returns. While the literature has emphasized long-run negative economic impacts via institutional quality, the changes in economic organization...
Abstract: Recent radical evolution in distributed sensing, computation, communication, and actuation has fostered the emergence of cyber-physical network systems. Examples cut across a broad spectrum of engineering and societal fields such as power grids...
Abstract: Television advertisements play an essential role in modern political campaigns with several billion dollars spent in the 2018 general election. For more than two decades, political scientists have studied TV ads by analyzing the hand-coded...
Abstract: The cognitive powers of the brain evolved from much more ancient processes in which cells, tissues, and even molecular networks had to make decisions to optimize their function in a challenging world. In this talk, I will discuss the field of...
Abstract: This paper proposes an approach to estimate quantiles of the distribution of treatment effects under the identifying assumption that treatment assignment is based on observed characteristics. We use a matching approach to derive the...
Abstract: Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks provide advertisers with “audience estimates” on how many of their users match certain targeting criteria. These estimates are usually used for budget planning and include targeting criteria such as...
Abstract: Whether police discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity when making stops is a topic of frequent debate among academics, in courts, and beyond. However, due to implausible assumptions about police behavior, the most commonly used tests...
Abstract: To date, evidence on pay-for-performance has been mixed. When pay-for-performance policies improve health outcomes, researchers should evaluate whether these health gains are worth the incremental costs (financial incentives and increased...
Abstract: Systematic discriminatory biases present in our society influence the way data is collected and stored, the way variables are defined, and the way scientific findings are put into practice as policy. Automated decision procedures and learning...
Abstract: We propose sensitivity analyses for selection in meta-analysis due to publication bias, selective reporting, and "p-hacking". We consider a publication process such that "statistically significant'' positive results are more likely to be...
