Guillaume Basse (Workshop in Applied Statistics)

Date: 

Wednesday, January 27, 2021, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Zoom - see below

You can attend this workshop via this link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/97787602526?pwd=Uzh3bVVVS0F4TEVYQTJlV3BQNjcydz09

If you would like to be added to the email list to receive reminders and information about the series, please send your email address to Soichiro Yamauchi (syamauchi@g.harvard.edu).

Today's presenter:

Guillaume Basse (Stanford University)

Abstract:

In hot policing, resources are targeted at specific locations predicted to be at high risk of crime; so-called "hot spots." Rather than reduce overall crime, however, there is a concern that these interventions simply displace crime from the targeted locations to nearby non-hot spots. We address this question in the context of a large-scale randomized experiment in Medellin, Colombia, in which police were randomly assigned to increase patrols at a subset of possible hotspots. Estimating the displacement effects on control locations is difficult because the probability that a nearby hotspot is treated is a complex function of the underlying geography. While existing methods developed for this "general interference" setting, especially Horvitz-Thompson (HT) estimators, have attractive theoretical properties, they can perform poorly in practice and mislead practitioners. In this talk, I explore the key pitfalls that practitioners should watch out for when conducting this type of analysis, and propose some ways to partially remedy them.

The Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) is a forum for 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. It is co-hosted by Harvard University's Department of Government and Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS).

For more information, visit the Applied Statistics website.