Past Events

  • 2024 Mar 21

    Charles Angelucci (Alesina Seminar)

    4:30pm to 5:45pm

    Location: 

    CGIS Knafel, room K354

    Today's Speaker

    Charles Angelucci (MIT), "Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election" (w/Michel Gutmann and Andrea Prat)

    Abstract

    We use a large-scale news knowledge survey conducted just before the 2020 US presidential election, alongside monthly survey data, to explore how partisan differences in political news beliefs evolve. We exploit questions repeated in multiple surveys to identify changes in beliefs about the same news stories as the election approaches. Our findings indicate that partisan bias intensifies two to threefold during election periods. Within a framework of motivated beliefs, this change in partisan bias is predominantly driven by an amplification of the partisan identity effect, rather than differences in partisan recall. We also present findings from a counterfactual analysis that assesses the impact of a hypothetical targeted misinformation campaign during and outside of elections.
    ... Read more about Charles Angelucci (Alesina Seminar)

  • 2024 Mar 20

    Workshop in Applied Statistics (Gov 3009)

    12:00pm to 1:30pm

    Location: 

    CGIS Knafel, room K354 or Online via Zoom

    This Week's Speaker

    Anton Strezhnev (UChicago), "A Guide to Dynamic Difference-in-Differences Regressions for Political Scientists"

    Abstract

    Difference-in-differences (DiD) designs for estimating causal effects have grown in popularity throughout political science. Many DiD papers present their central results through an "event study" plot - a visualization that combines estimated dynamic average treatment effects for multiple post-treatment time periods alongside placebo tests of the main identifying assumption: parallel trends. Despite their...

    Read more about Workshop in Applied Statistics (Gov 3009)
  • 2024 Mar 20

    Dataverse Open Office Hours

    Repeats every week every Wednesday until Wed Aug 28 2024 except Wed Dec 27 2023, Wed Mar 13 2024, Wed Jun 19 2024.
    11:00am to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Virtual via Zoom

    Weekly office hours are open to Harvard researchers and staff to provide support for Dataverse 6.0. Demo of 6.0 will begin promptly at 11am.

    Open Hours: Wednesdays, 11AM - 1PM

    RSVP required to: support@dataverse.org

    For any questions on how to share your data with Dataverse, contact: support@dataverse.org

     

  • 2024 Mar 19

    Andrew O'Donohue (APRW)

    12:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    CGIS Knafel, room K354

    Speaker

    Andrew O’Donohue, "The Court of Public Opinion: How Competing Rhetoric about Trump's Prosecution Affects Political Attitudes"

    Abstract

    Prosecutions of political leaders may have double-edged effects on public opinion. While legal interventions may turn public opinion against law-breaking politicians, prosecutions may also increase support for the accused leader and encourage his supporters to seek retaliation. Crucially, political elites seek to persuade citizens with competing framings of political prosecutions. Whereas legal officials...

    Read more about Andrew O'Donohue (APRW)
  • 2024 Mar 07

    Melissa Dell (Alesina Seminar)

    4:30pm to 5:45pm

    Location: 

    CGIS Knafel, room K354

    Today's Speaker

    Melissa Dell (Department of Economics), "Deep Learning for Political Economy"

    Abstract

    Deep learning provides a robust method for learning a mapping between unstructured data (e.g., text, images, audio) and computable representations that can power downstream analyses. These methods, which have already transformed a variety of disciplines, allow us to process traditional data sources at an unprecedented scale and to bring completely new types of data into political economy analyses. Yet taking existing methods off-the-shelf often has significant limitations - particularly for historical applications or those in non-Western societies – given the domain shift from the pre-training corpora that power much of deep learning. This talk will provide an overview of work developing novel datasets and methods for using deep learning to examine social science questions. These include a series of user-friendly open-source packages for deep learning-powered document layout analysis, OCR, record linkage, and other data wrangling tasks, designed to be highly extensible to a diversity of societies. I will also introduce massive-scale open-source text datasets that we curated by applying deep learning to historical newspapers. These are useful both for large-scale pre-training and for social science research. Finally, I will discuss deep learning methods designed to examine the influence of historical media.... Read more about Melissa Dell (Alesina Seminar)

  • 2024 Mar 06

    Workshop in Applied Statistics (Gov 3009)

    12:00pm to 1:30pm

    Location: 

    CGIS Knafel, room K354 or Online via Zoom

    This Week's Speaker

    Amanda Coston (Microsoft Research), "Addressing confounding in decision-making algorithms"

    Abstract

    Machine learning algorithms are used for decision-making in societally high-stakes settings from child welfare and criminal justice to healthcare and consumer lending. These algorithms are often intended to predict outcomes under a proposed decision. It is challenging to evaluate how well these algorithms perform because we only observe the relevant outcome under a biased sample of the population. In this talk, we explore how to use...

    Read more about Workshop in Applied Statistics (Gov 3009)
  • 2024 Mar 06

    Dataverse Open Office Hours

    11:00am to 1:00pm

    Location: 

    Virtual via Zoom

    Weekly office hours are open to Harvard researchers and staff to provide support for Dataverse 6.0. Demo of 6.0 will begin promptly at 11am.

    Open Hours: Wednesdays, 11AM - 1PM

    RSVP required to: support@dataverse.org

    For any questions on how to share your data with Dataverse, contact: support@dataverse.org

     

  • 2024 Mar 05

    Kiara Hernandez (APRW)

    12:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    CGIS Knafel, room K354

    Speaker

    Kiara Hernandez, "Firm-level Ethnoracial Diversity and Support for Unionization"

    Abstract

    In the United States today, mass preferences for fiscal and social spending policies appear minimally responsive to rising earnings inequality and rapidly deteriorating job protections. Theories of political behavior and political economy maintain that because individuals’ preferences for redistribution depend on whether they perceive racial outgroups to be policy beneficiaries, racial animus may explain the mismatch between contemporary inequality and...

    Read more about Kiara Hernandez (APRW)

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