A Good Instrument Is Hard to Find No matter what academic discipline you’re in, estimating causal effects is hard. And one key characteristic of HPE research is that the data is observational, and so we as researchers can’t control the treatment assignment. We weren’t there! That time has passed! So today, I’m going to talk … Continue reading A Good Instrument Is Hard To Find
Update: Thanks to our enthusiastic readers, I've update the post to include a new paper on Economic Maps, and a great data viz using WWII maps from the LOC (that was made after seeing this post!) When we think of collecting data from archives, we are typically thinking of collecting data from books that are … Continue reading Finding Historical Data IV: A Post with Cool Maps
One of the top journals in political science, the Journal of Politics, announced this week that all experimental research (laboratory, field, and survey experiments) will be required to be preregistered. For those unfamiliar, a “pre-analysis plan” or PAP consists of a document of how a researcher will collect and analyze data, which is submitted to … Continue reading Elementary, My Dear PAP?
Interdisciplinary work can be great. In particular, HPE scholars should take note of advances in the digital humanities, which are combining tools like machine learning to analyze large corpuses of text-as-data and images-as-data. The ability to draw on new types of historical sources, across fields, is exciting. But often the best work in interdisciplinary studies … Continue reading Do you trust this post?
Yesterday, many of us sat doomscrolling and watching one of the most contentious elections in US history (and the outcome is undetermined, as of the publishing of this post). It was contentious for many reasons, but this election — as well as the entire Trump administration — will go down in history because they featured … Continue reading Nothing Older Than Fake News
On Monday I blogged about how to find data using digital libraries, featuring a few of my favorite HPE sites. Particularly if your trip to the archives has been cancelled because of Covid-19, online libraries can be a great alternative option. As the nights get colder and we are stuck indoors, digitizing and/or coding some … Continue reading Finding Historical Data III
This week’s post turns once again to practical matters, and continues our series on “how to find historical data.” The first post in the series covered online dataverses, while today’s post will look at sources of digitized data provided by libraries. National libraries are increasingly scanning documents in their collections and providing them online for … Continue reading Finding Historical Data II
As someone who does historical research, I think the most common question I get is “Where can I find historical data on X?” Now, this is actually a very intelligent question (although unfortunately I don’t always know the answer). While some locations of historical data are obvious, especially if it’s a matter of public record, … Continue reading Finding Historical Data I
Pandemics provide a compelling opportunity to learn from the past. Massive disease outbreaks are a recurrent feature of human history and, despite advances in medicine and general understanding, still pose significant risks to society. This is why so many parallels are now being drawn between the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 -19 and the COVID-19 crisis … Continue reading Pandemics Are Political