Related papers: Statistical methods to estimate the impact of gun …
Following recent shootings in the USA, a debate has erupted, one side favoring stricter gun control, the other promoting protection through more weapons. We provide a scientific foundation to inform this debate, based on mathematical,…
In the United States, firearm-related deaths and injuries are a major public health issue. Because of limited federal action, state policies are particularly important, and their evaluation informs the actions of other policymakers. The…
In the United States the laws regulating the carrying of firearms in public vary state-to-state. In a highly publicized event, the Governor of New Mexico recently issued an emergency order temporarily banning the carrying of firearms in…
Gun violence is a major source of injury and death in the United States. However, relatively little is known about the effects of firearm injuries on survivors and their family members and how these effects vary across subpopulations. To…
We propose a simple mathematical model to describe the evolution of violent crimes. For such purpose, we built a model based on ordinary differential equations that take into account the number of violent crimes and the number of legal and…
Among industrialized countries, U.S. holds two somehow inglorious records: the highest rate of fatal police shootings and the highest rate of deaths related to firearms. The latter has been associated with strong diffusion of firearms…
This paper introduces estimation methods for grouped latent heterogeneity in panel data quantile regression. We assume that the observed individuals come from a heterogeneous population with a finite number of types. The number of types and…
Policy evaluation studies, which intend to assess the effect of an intervention, face some statistical challenges: in real-world settings treatments are not randomly assigned and the analysis might be further complicated by the presence of…
Risk assessment algorithms in criminal justice put people's lives at the discretion of a simple statistical tool. This thesis explores how algorithmic decision-making in criminal policy can exhibit feedback effects, where disadvantage…
The United States leads the world in the number of mass shootings that occur each year, even as policy making on firearms remains polarized along party lines. In the face of increasing violence and public demand for policy action, we ask…
Understanding how best to estimate state-level policy effects is important, and several unanswered questions remain, particularly about the ability of statistical models to disentangle the effects of concurrently enacted policies. In…
This paper applies new and recently introduced approaches to study trends in gun violence in the United States. We use techniques in both the time and frequency domain to provide a more complete understanding of gun violence dynamics. We…
Autoregressive models are widely used for the analysis of time-series data, but they remain underutilized when estimating effects of interventions. This is in part due to endogeneity of the lagged outcome with any intervention of interest,…
This paper proposes a framewrok for analyzing how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are unobserved. Rather than focusing solely on average outcomes, the approach uses readily…
Over the last decade, the number of randomized trials of programs to reduce intimate partner violence (IPV) has grown precipitously. However, most trials continue to measure and code violence using standards originally designed for global…
To limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, governments across the world implemented extraordinary physical distancing policies, such as stay-at-home orders, and numerous studies aim to estimate their effects. Many statistical and…
We study settings in which a researcher has an instrumental variable (IV) and seeks to evaluate the effects of a counterfactual policy that alters treatment assignment, such as a directive encouraging randomly assigned judges to release…
This thesis presents a novel framework for analysing the societal impacts of armed conflict by applying principles from engineering and material science. Building on the idea of a "social fabric", it recasts communities as plates with…
A variety of fairness constraints have been proposed in the literature to mitigate group-level statistical bias. Their impacts have been largely evaluated for different groups of populations corresponding to a set of sensitive attributes,…
The United States have some of the highest rates of gun violence among developed countries. Yet, there is a disagreement about the extent to which firearms should be regulated. In this study, we employ social media signals to examine the…