Robert Kubinec

Assistant Professor of Political Science

New York University Abu Dhabi

About

This website serves mainly as a blog in which I present ideas on political-economic topics I study and issues related to data science with R/Rstudio and causal inference. My R-related posts are syndicated with RBloggers, a consortium of R bloggers.

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. To see a list of my current working papers and access the PDFs, see my Google Scholar page.

Scroll down to see my recent blog posts.

Recent Posts

Fixing Fractional Logit

This post focuses on one of the more curious models in contemporary statistics, a specification for proportions that is either called fractional logit or quasi-Binomial. While in most cases in statistics, the evaluation of a model necessarily involves trade-offs in which a model is best applied to certain cases but not others, in this case fractional logit is simply the wrong model.

Last updated on Feb 17, 2023 12 min read R

What's Logs Got to Do With It?

Twitter (or what’s left of it) was recently ablaze with a discussion of two smart working papers, one by Jiafeng Chen and Jonathan Roth and the other by John Mullahy and Edward Norton.

Last updated on Dec 21, 2022 10 min read R

Simulating Turnout in Tunisia's Constitutional Referendum

I am writing this post in response to questions about estimating turnout for Tunisia’s constitutional referendum today. Turnout is an important aspect to this referendum because high turnout would signal higher legitimacy for President Kais Saied’s dramatic changes to the Tunisia’s democracy.

Last updated on Jul 25, 2022 7 min read R

What To Do (And Not to Do) with Modeling Proportions/Fractional Outcomes

Introduction Limited dependent variables, or continuous variables with lower and upper bounds, are quite common in the social sciences but do not fit easily with existing statistical models. In this Rmarkdown document, I show why these issues are important to consider when modeling your data, discuss existing R packages useful for fitting these models, and also present ordbetareg, an R package with a new variant of Beta regression that builds on and simplifies existing approaches (see paper here that is forthcoming in Political Analysis).

Last updated on Jul 1, 2022 31 min read R

Energy Nationalism To the Rescue

The Russian invasion of the Ukraine has raised a new specter of energy nationalism. Although only the United Kingdom and the United States have gone as far as outright banning Russian oil and gas, other European economies, including Germany, are seriously discussing weaning off of their main energy supplier.

Last updated on Apr 3, 2022 4 min read Political Economy

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