# Cory McCartan (Workshop in Applied Statistics) #### calendar\_today Date and Time **March 8, 2023** 12:00PM - 01:30PM EST #### pin\_drop Location **CGIS Knafel Building, room K354 or Online via Zoom** ### **Today's Speaker** Cory McCartan (Department of Statistics) presents "Estimating Racial Disparities when Race is Not Observed" ### **Abstract** The estimation of racial disparities in health care, financial services, voting, and other contexts is often hampered by the lack of individual-level racial information in administrative records. In many cases, the law prohibits the collection of such information to prevent direct racial discrimination. As a result, many analysts have adopted Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG), which combines individual names and addresses with the Census data to predict race. Although BISG tends to produce well-calibrated racial predictions, its residuals are often correlated with the outcomes of interest, yielding biased estimates of racial disparities. We propose an alternative identification strategy that corrects this bias. The proposed strategy is applicable whenever one’s surname is conditionally independent of the outcome given their (unobserved) race, residence location, and other observed characteristics. Leveraging this identification strategy, we introduce a new class of models, Bayesian Instrumental Regression for Disparity Estimation (BIRDiE), that estimate racial disparities by using surnames as a high-dimensional instrumental variable for race. Our estimation method is scalable, making it possible to analyze large-scale administrative data. A validation study based on the North Carolina voter file shows that BIRDiE reduces error by up to 84% in comparison to the standard approaches for estimating racial differences in party identification. *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.* *More information is available at the Gov 3009 website: * *All interested Harvard affiliates are invited to attend.* See also:- [ Workshops, Seminars & Classes ](/event-type/workshops-seminars-classes) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#) Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://www.iq.harvard.edu/node/1663882/event-feed.ics) Copy link link