Extra causal inference resources
Hi everyone!
I hope you’re all enjoying spring break and this beautiful Atlanta weather!
I just wanted to point out some really helpful resources and extra guides for all the causal inference methods we’ve been talking about this semester. There are a couple overarching organizations that focus on evidence-based policy that provide a ton of excellent free resources:
Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP)
EGAP is a political science-focused evidence-based workgroup that sets standards for research and program evaluation (like creating best practices for preregistration), publishes policy briefs on causal work, and (most importantly for our class) provides a ton of guides and resources for causal inference.
Make sure you check out their Methods Guide section, where you’ll find a bunch of brief and accessible “10 Things to Know About X” guides, like these:
- “10 Strategies for Figuring Out if X Caused Y”
- “10 Things to Know About Causal Inference”
- “10 Things to Know About Hypothesis Testing”
- “10 Things to Know About Reading a Regression Table”
- “10 Things to Know About Pre-Analysis Plans”
You already saw one of these back in the readings for week 6 (the “10 Things to Know About Statistical Power” guide), but there are lots of others that you should check out and reference in the future.
Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
J-PAL is a economics-focused evidence-based workgroup that focuses on international development interventions (its founders Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019). Similar to EGAP’s policy briefs, they publish short “Policy Insights” summarizing the best evidence on specific policies like education, crime, gender, health, and so on.
Importantly for our class, they also have a big library of research resources with step-by-step guides to planning, designing, running, and analyzing projects.
For instance, check out the “Data analysis” guide, which contains R and Stata code for finding different treatment effects (ATE, ATT, ITT, LATE), as well as short, accessible explanations of what those all are.