# 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.

## 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.

## 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).

## The Causal Representation of Panel Data: A Comment On Xu (2022)

NB: An earlier version of this post critiqued Victor Chernozhukov’s approach to directed a-cyclic graphs and fixed effects, but made some critical errors in interpreting his approach. These errors were entirely mine, and I apologize to Victor for doing so.

## Which Religious Groups Have the Most Sex?

There has been plenty of discussion about declining fertility rates and patterns of marriage among people in the United States following the news that the US birth rate declined to its lowest since the Great Depression.

## An Overview of Data for COVID Analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a wealth of research studies examining various aspects of the pandemic. In this post, I will discuss some of the available datasets for doing aggregate level analysis, i.

## How to Estimate Models with Measurement Error for our COVID-19 Indices

This tutorial gives an overview of the COVID-19 policy indexes just released by the CoronaNet project of which I am a part and the Oxford Government Response Tracker.

## The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in the CDC's Face Mask Study

While perusing the news, I read eagerly about the CDC’s recent study examining associations between county-level mask mandates and COVID-19 growth rates. This study has already been the subject of angry retorts from the restaurant industry due to the CDC’s claim that restaurant closures reduced COVID-19 spread.

## 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.

## 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: $VE = 1 - \frac{p_t}{p_c}$