Replication: The Heart of Science, Cont’d
Aha! I knew it. Herndon’s critique of Reinhart and Rogoff “began life as a replication exercise for a term paper in a graduate econometrics class.” More here.
View ArticleSurvivorship Bias, Sample Sizes, and the Oregon Medicaid Study
I think most coverage of the Oregon Medicaid Study [gated] has been bad. Very bad. I wanted to flag one way that it has been especially bad. We don’t do very much U.S. domestic politics on the...
View ArticleNuclear Weapons and War
I wanted to flag a soon-to-be-published article by my colleagues at MIT, Mark Bell and Nicholas Miller, looking at whether and how nuclear weapons possession affects conflict. The paper is interesting...
View ArticleTerrorism Data Remains a Mess
I’ve recently been trying to get a handle on terrorism trends in Pakistan, and in that process have been reminded of the problems in terrorism datasets. Based on extant data, I could tell you two...
View ArticleCell Phones and Conflict
Jan H. Pierskalla and Florian M. Hollenbach have a new paper (via the Monkey Cage) arguing that cell phone coverage makes collective action easier, and that includes making political violence easier....
View ArticleNaming and Faming: Forbes’ Power Women
Forbes’ list of Most Powerful Women for this year is out and Angela Merkel has come out on top again, for the 7th time in the last 8 years. I was struck by the number of American women on the list...
View ArticleWhat We’re Reading
Substitute political words for the medical words in this excerpt: “The current regime was built during a time of pervasive ignorance when the best we could do was throw a drug and a placebo against a...
View ArticleIs Syria’s Civil War A Result of Too Little ‘Bandwidth’ in Washington?
A commonly heard refrain about why the Obama administration has not done X or Y in [insert global troublespot name here] is that there is just not enough bandwidth. Richard Haass, discussing how Iraq...
View ArticleForecasting and Ethics
Idean Salehyean has a provocative post over at the Monkey Cage arguing that forecasting is not a value neutral enterprise. If we forecast some outcome, we should expect policymakers to take some steps...
View ArticleForecasting and Ethics, Ctd.
A few additional thoughts (original thoughts here) inspired by posts on Duck of Minerva and Dart-Throwing Chimp. First, I just want to agree wholeheartedly with Jay Ulfelder’s conclusion on...
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