I just thought I'd send you guys a little reminder about the importance of good writing. Who better to send this message than, my favorite, The New Yorker's Comma Queen. I love her! Here she is with a special Thanksgiving explanation of when to use "like" vs. "as." Enjoy the video and the turkey today!
Speaking of turkeys, ever wonder why they're so cheap this time of year? Read this.
Thursday, November 24, 2016
Friday, November 11, 2016
Chris Blattman's Job Market Advice
Click here.
There are a lot of helpful tips in there! If nothing else, read "the big stuff." I also really like the part on the major differences between academic and policy jobs. Actually, I really like pretty much all of it.
But let me add my own addition: It is very easy to get overwhelmed by all of this job market advice. Let me remind you that the biggest determinants of your job market success are things that you have no control over by the time you're on the market: The quality of your research (you won't be able to make major changes by the time you're searching for a job), your field (in particular, the number of jobs in your field relative to the number of job market candidates), and your graduate school/advisor (that has already been chosen). Am I missing any others?
My point: Read the advice columns, but don't sweat the small stuff (too much). The important thing is to keep working hard.
There are a lot of helpful tips in there! If nothing else, read "the big stuff." I also really like the part on the major differences between academic and policy jobs. Actually, I really like pretty much all of it.
But let me add my own addition: It is very easy to get overwhelmed by all of this job market advice. Let me remind you that the biggest determinants of your job market success are things that you have no control over by the time you're on the market: The quality of your research (you won't be able to make major changes by the time you're searching for a job), your field (in particular, the number of jobs in your field relative to the number of job market candidates), and your graduate school/advisor (that has already been chosen). Am I missing any others?
My point: Read the advice columns, but don't sweat the small stuff (too much). The important thing is to keep working hard.
Saturday, November 5, 2016
More on Synthetic Control Techniques
News!! There is a brand new NBER working paper on synthetic control techniques! Guido Imbens and coauthor, Nikolay Doudchenko, propose a new technique allowing researchers to relax some of the restrictions in the traditional ADH synthetic control method. Download the paper here, but you can also just have a look at the abstract below:
Balancing, Regression, Difference-In-Differences and Synthetic Control Methods: A Synthesis
In a seminal paper Abadie et al (2010) develop the synthetic control procedure for estimating the effect of a treatment, in the presence of a single treated unit and a number of control units, with pre-treatment outcomes observed for all units. The method constructs a set of weights such that covariates and pre-treatment outcomes of the treated unit are approximately matched by a weighted average of control units. The weights are restricted to be nonnegative and sum to one, which allows the procedure to obtain the weights even when the number of lagged outcomes is modest relative to the number of control units, a setting that is not uncommon in applications. In the current paper we propose a more general class of synthetic control estimators that allows researchers to relax some of the restrictions in the ADH method. We allow the weights to be negative, do not necessarily restrict the sum of the weights, and allow for a permanent additive difference between the treated unit and the controls, similar to difference-in-difference procedures. The weights directly minimize the distance between the lagged outcomes for the treated and the control units, using regularization methods to deal with a potentially large number of possible control units.
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