Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009)

Date: 

Wednesday, April 1, 2020, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Zoom - see below

The Gov 3009 workshop will be conducted remotely for the remainder of Spring 2020. 

Zoom link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/987462892

Today's speaker: Soichiro Yamauchi (Harvard University), “Difference-in-Differences for Ordinal Outcomes: Application to the Effect of Mass Shootings on Attitudes towards Gun Control.”

Abstract: The difference-in-differences (DID) design is widely used in observational studies to estimate the causal effect of a treatment when repeated observations over time are available. Yet, almost all existing methods assume linearity in the potential outcome (parallel trends assumption) and target the additive effect. In social science research, however, many outcomes of interest are measured on an ordinal scale. This makes the linearity assumption inappropriate because the difference between two ordinal potential outcomes is not well defined. In this paper, I propose a method to draw causal inferences for ordinal outcomes under the DID design. Unlike existing methods, the proposed method utilizes the latent variable framework to handle the non-numeric nature of the outcome, enabling identification and estimation of causal effects based on the assumption on the quantile of the latent continuous variable. The paper also proposes an equivalence-based test to assess the plausibility of the key identification assumption when additional pre-treatment periods are available. The proposed method is applied to a study estimating the causal effect of mass shootings on the public’s support for gun control. I find that the effect is concentrated on left-leaning respondents who experienced the shooting for the first time in more than a decade. A copy of the paper can be found here. 

The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) meets all academic year, Wednesdays, 12pm-1:30pm, in CGIS K354. This workshop is a forum for advanced graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to present and discuss methodological or empirical work in progress in an interdisciplinary setting. The workshop features a tour of Harvard's statistical innovations and applications with weekly stops in different fields and disciplines and includes occasional presentations by invited speakers. Free lunch is provided.

More information is available at the Gov 3009 website: https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009