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Liberalizing Daughters: Do Daughters Cause MCs to be Slightly More Liberal on Women's Issues?

Two papers estimate the impact of having a daughter on Members of Congress’ (MCs) position on women’s issues. Washington (2008) finds that each additional daughter (conditional on the number of children) causes about a 2-point increase in liberalism on women’s issues using data from the 105th to 108th

It Depends! Effect of Quotas On Women's Representation

“[Q]uotas are often thought of as temporary measures, used to improve the lot of particular groups of people until they can take care of themselves.”Bhavnani 2011 So how quickly can be withdraw the quota? The answer depends—plausibly on space, office, and time. “In West Bengal …[i]n

Political Macroeconomics

Look, Ma, I Connected Some Dots! In late 2019, in a lecture at the Watson Center at Brown University, Raghuram Rajan spoke about the challenges facing the Indian economy. While discussing the trends in growth in the Indian economy (I have linked to the relevant section in the video, see

Superhuman: Can ML Beat Human-Level Performance in Supervised Models?

A supervised model cannot do better than its labels. (I revisit this point later.) So the trick is to make labels as good as you can. The errors in labels stem from four sources: 1. Lack of Effort: The more effort people spend labeling something, presumably, the more accurate it

No Shit! Open Defecation in India

On Oct. 2nd, 2019, on Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birthday, and just five years after the launch of the Swachh Bharat Campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared India ODF. The 2018-2019 Annual Sanitation Survey corroborates the progress: Reducing open defecation matters because it can reduce child mortality and stunting. For

Sense and Selection

The following essay is by Chaste. The article was written in early 2018. ——— I will discuss the confounding selection strategies of England, India, and South Africa in the recently finished series. I won’t talk about minutiae like whether Vince’s technique is suited to Australian conditions or whether Rohit

Subscribing To Unpopular Opinion

How does the move from advertising-supported content to a subscription model, e.g., NY Times, Substack luminaries, etc., change the content being produced? Ben Thompson mulls over the question in a new column. One of the changes he foresees is that the content will be increasingly geared toward subscribers—elites

Too Much Churn: Estimating Customer Churn

A new paper uses financial transaction data to estimate customer churn in consumer-facing companies. The paper defines churn as follows: There are three concerns with the definition: 1. The definition doesn’t make clear what the normalizing constant is for calculating the share. Given that the value “can vary between

94.5% Certain That Covid Vaccine Will Be Less Than 94.5% Effective

“On Sunday, an independent monitoring board broke the code to examine 95 infections that were recorded starting two weeks after volunteers’ second dose — and discovered all but five illnesses occurred in participants who got the placebo.”Moderna Says Its COVID-19 Vaccine Is 94.5% Effective In Early Tests The data