I’ve been teaching a course on program evaluation since Fall 2019, and while part of the class is focused on logic models and the more managerial aspects of evaluation, the bulk of the class is focused on causal inference. Ever since reading Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why in 2019, I’ve thrown myself into the world of DAGs, econometrics, and general causal inference, and I’ve been both teaching it and using it in research ever since.

Update #1 An update to knitr has made it a ton easier to embed fonts in SVG files from R. Jump to the update to see how. Update #2 Also, it’s possible to change TikZ fonts and not use Computer Modern for everything! Jump to the second update to see how.

The world of econometrics has been roiled over the past couple years with a bunch of new papers showing how two-way fixed effects (TWFE; situations with nested levels of observations, like country-year, state-month, etc.) estimates of causal effects from difference-in-differences-based natural experiments can be biased when treatment is applied at different times.

Regression is the core of my statistics and program evaluation/causal inference courses. As I’ve taught different stats classes, I’ve found that one of the regression diagnostic statistics that students really glom onto is . Unlike lots of regression diagnostics like AIC, BIC, and the joint F-statistic, has a really intuitive interpretation—it’s the percent of variation in the outcome variable explained by all the explanatory variables.

Downloads Jump to the downloads and get your own free pattern and template files! Apparently I now only produce cross stitch content. Thanks, pandemic. In preparation for season 2 of the incredible Ted Lasso , I made a cross stitch version of the AFC Richmond crest, and I’m really happy with how it turned out!

Downloads Jump to the downloads and get your own free pattern and template files! In the data science world, hex stickers with logos of developers’ favorite packages are all the rage.

Some ideas about how the peer review process in academic publishing can be used as a device for preregistering parts of an empirical analysis.

The bi-annual publication of the APSA Section on Qualitative Methods and Multi-Method Research has a highly interesting and controversial symposium on confirmation bias in process tracing in its current issue.

Downloads Jump to the downloads and get your own free pattern! For my latest pandemic art medium (on this, the three hundred and nineteenth day of sheltering in place), I decided to teach myself how to cross stitch. I did a ton of needlepoint as a kid and teen, but was always afraid of cross stitch because it was so much smaller and more delicate.

Since my last two blog posts on binary and continuous inverse probability weights (IPWs) and marginal structural models (MSMs) for time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) panel data, I’ve spent a ton of time trying to figure out why I couldn’t recover the exact causal effect I had built in to those examples when using panel data. It was a mystery, and it took weeks to figure out what was happening.