Stephanie Ternullo, "'It makes me sound like I’m a NIMBY; I'm not': Local Political Norms and Liberal Support for Housing"
Abstract
Under what conditions do affluent liberals vote in line with their ideology over their self-interest? Specifically, under what conditions do homeowning liberals prioritize their own interests over their ideological commitments when it comes to local land-use decisions? Several recent studies have sought to address this question by examining how different characteristics of hypothetical local developments or...
Julia Cage (Sciences Po, Paris), "The Far-Right Donation Gap" (joint with Moritz Hengel and Yuchen Huang)
Abstract
We document a widespread decline in the share of donors to charities in Western countries over the past decade and show that this can be in part explained by a lower propensity to donate among far-right voters. Focusing on France, we first conduct a large-scale survey (N = 12, 600) and show that far-right voters are significantly less likely to report a charitable donation than the rest of the population, conditional on a rich set of controls. Second, using administrative tax data for the universe of French municipalities (N ≃ 33, 000) combined with electoral results, we find that the negative relationship between vote shares for the far right and charitable donations holds in a broad range of specifications, at both the extensive and the intensive margin, and controlling for municipality fixed effects. Third, we exploit unique geo-localized donation data from several charities and document similar patterns. All evidence points towards a drop in the propensity to donate driven by a shift in social norms that threatens general acceptance of the charitable sector. We provide consistent evidence using survey data from Germany and novel tax data from Italy. ... Read more about Julia Cage (Alesina Seminar)
Zeyang Jia (Department of Statistics), "Bayesian Safe Policy Learning with Chance Constrained Optimization: Application to the Military Security Assessment in the Vietnam War"
Abstract
Algorithmic and data-driven decisions and recommendations are commonly used in high-stakes decision-making settings such as criminal justice, medicine, and public policy. We investigate whether it would have been possible to improve a security assessment algorithm employed during the Vietnam War, using outcomes measured immediately after its...
CGIS South, room S050 (Thomas Chan-Soo Kang Room) and virtual via Zoom
Speakers
The Spatial Data Lab Team (see full list below)
Abstract
This seminar will introduce the KNIME Analytics Platform and its Geospatial Analytics extension developed by the Spatial Data Lab (SDL) team at Harvard's Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA). The SDL team members will share the presentations, presenting the project's vision and demonstrating the new way of performing geospatial...
Matthew Dardet, "Respondent Psychology and Nonresponse Bias in Political Surveys"
Aidan Connaughton, "The Value of Public Comment for Local Bureaucrats"
Abstracts
"Respondent Psychology and Nonresponse Bias in Political Surveys"
Individuals’ personalities are correlated with many of their political attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and identifications. Moreover, initial research has indicated that personality may play a role in determining survey nonresponse and in shaping within-survey response...
Nico Voigtlander (UCLA), "History’s Masters: The Effect of European Monarchs on State Performance"
Abstract
We create a novel reign-level dataset for European monarchs, covering all major European states between the 10th and 18th centuries. We first document a strong positive relationship between rulers’ cognitive ability and state-level outcomes. To address endogeneity issues, we exploit the facts that i) rulers were appointed according to hereditary succession, independent of their ability, and ii) the wide-spread inbreeding among the ruling dynasties of Europe led over centuries to quasi-random variation in ruler ability. We code the degree of blood relationship between the parents of rulers, which also reflects ‘hidden’ layers of inbreeding from previous generations. The ‘coefficient of inbreeding’ is a strong predictor of ruler ability, and the corresponding instrumental variable results imply that ruler ability had a sizeable effect on the performance of states and their borders. This supports the view that ‘leaders made history,’ shaping the European map until its consolidation into nation states. We also show that rulers mattered only where their power was largely unconstrained. In reigns where parliaments checked the power of monarchs, ruler ability no longer affected their state’s performance. Thus, the strengthening of parliaments in Northern European states (where kin marriage of dynasties was particularly wide-spread) may have shielded them from the detrimental effects of inbreeding.... Read more about Nico Voigtländer (Alesina Seminar)
Naijia Liu (Department of Government), "Synthetic Control Method with Pre-treatment Outcomes Missing" (joint w/ Sooahn Shin and Soichiro Yamauchi)
Abstract
The synthetic control method (SCM) is commonly used in social science research to estimate treatment effects. It involves creating a synthesized control unit for the treated unit in observational studies. The quality of this synthesized control unit is influenced by factors like the number of pretreatment periods and missing values. Many empirical datasets, particularly those with a panel structure, often encounter issues with missing values. This project studies the impact of missing values... Read more about Naijia Liu (Workshop in Applied Statistics)