Robert Kubinec

Assistant Professor of Political Science

New York University Abu Dhabi

Biography

My research centers on political-economic issues such as corruption, economic development, and business-state relations in developing countries, and in particular the Middle East and North Africa. I am also involved in the development of Bayesian statistical models with Stan for hard-to-study subjects like corruption, polarization, and other latent social constructs.

Interests

Political Economy
Middle East and North Africa
Applied Bayesian Methods (Stan)

Education

PhD, 2018

University of Virginia

Recent Posts

Linking to RBloggers

You can access RBloggers, an R consortium of bloggers, at this link.

Nov 27, 2020 1 min read

Why People Are Doubting the AstraZeneca Vaccine Report

In this blog post, I use Gelman and Loken’s garden of forking paths analysis to construct a simulation showing why skepticism of AstraZeneca’s vaccine results is warranted at this early stage.

Nov 27, 2020 6 min read

A More Realistic P-Value for the Pfizer Vaccine Report

I start with Eric Novik’s excellent blog post on how to calculate the relevant statistics for the vaccine, i.e. vaccine efficacy (VE). This is defined as: \[ VE = 1 - \frac{p_t}{p_c} \]

Nov 19, 2020 4 min read

Why You Should Be Careful About the MaterniT 21 Test

My wife and I have been faced with a decision in our pregnancies that has always caused me some consternation: should we take the MaterniT 21 test to see if our baby might have Down’s syndrome (trisomy 21) or other genetic abnormalities?

Sep 13, 2020 13 min read

What Panel Data Is Really All About

We’ve all been in that seminar where the author puts up a slide containing regression coefficients, and buried in the bottom line of the table we can see little Ys and Ns indicating the kind of panel data model employed.

Apr 22, 2020 29 min read

See all posts