When making causal (or descriptive) inferences, it is important to think about the context within which the causal relationship is expected to hold because it probably does not hold universally and, possibly, only in a limited setting. Falleti and Lynch have written an excellent article about “context” (I drop the ““ now) in relation with causal mechanisms.

(See this notebook on GitHub) A year ago, I wrote about how to use R to solve a typical microeconomics problem: finding the optimal price and quantity of some product given its demand and cost. Doing this involves setting the first derivatives of two functions equal to each other and using algebra to find where they cross.

(See this notebook on GitHub) Taking a sample from two groups from a population and seeing if there’s a significant or substantial difference between them is a standard task in statistics.

I am so beyond thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University in Fall 2019 as an assistant professor in the Department of Public Management and Policy. I’ll be teaching classes in statistics/data science, economics, and nonprofit management in beautiful downtown Atlanta, and we’ll be moving back to the South. I am so so excited about this!

On September 27, the German Science Foundation (DFG) announced its decision to award the status of a research cluster of excellence (Exzellenzcluster) to 57 cluster proposals from all disciplines.

One measure of unequal opportunity is intergenerational economic mobility, the “chance that people who spent their childhood in that location ended up, as adults, higher on the income and economic-status ranking than their parents” (Sanders 2017). A person who lives in a region with high intergenerational economic mobility will be more likely to be in a higher income bracket in their 40s than their parents were at the same age: “the place you

Premier Dalton McGuinty’s decision to introduce a harmonized sales tax (HST) on July 1st, 2010 in Ontario was met with widespread opposition. Politicians denounced the move as politically disastrous. Lorne Gunter argued in the National Post that “McGuinty lacks the natural revulsion for higher taxes that most consumers have.” Considering the political challenges, why did McGuinty implement the HST?

About two weeks ago, COMPASSS issued a Statement on Rejecting Article Submissions because of QCA Solution Type. In short, the reasoning was that methodological work on QCA is developing and that reviewers and editors should not judge empirical work based on whether one particular solution type is interpreted as causal.

The charge that Political Science (or other non-STEM disciplines) is lacking relevance and does not produce interesting research is made then and again, with two new pieces published these days. One is written by a political economist, stating that most research is boring;

Continuing the chapter-by-chapter review of Seawright’s book on Multi-Method Social Science took me longer than I imagined and it should have, but here we go again.