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We investigate how government-orchestrated assaults on the judiciary, disguised as modernization efforts, undermine judicial independence. Our study focuses on Venezuela's constitutional overhaul in the early 2000s, initiated by Hugo…
With a majority of 'Yes' votes in the Constitutional Referendum of 2017, Turkey continues its transition from democracy to autocracy. By the will of the Turkish people, this referendum transferred practically all executive power to…
The synthetic control method is an empirical methodology forcausal inference using observational data. By observing thespread of COVID-19 throughout the world, we analyze the dataon the number of deaths and cases in different regions…
On June 24, 2018, Turkey conducted a highly-consequential election in which the Turkish people elected their president and parliament in the first election under a new presidential system. During the election period, the Turkish people…
Multiple countries have recently experienced extreme political polarization, which in some cases led to escalation of hate crime, violence and political instability. Beside the much discussed presidential elections in the United States and…
In this paper, we adopt results in nonlinear time series analysis for causal inference in dynamical settings.~Our motivation is policy analysis with panel data, particularly through the use of "synthetic control" methods. These methods…
The synthetic control estimator (Abadie et al., 2010) is asymptotically unbiased assuming that the outcome is a linear function of the underlying predictors and that the treated unit can be well approximated by the synthetic control before…
This paper examines whether major political institutional disruptions produce temporary shocks or structural breaks in long-term development. Using the 1979 Iranian Revolution as a natural experiment, we apply the synthetic control method…
Synthetic control methods are widely used for policy evaluation, but most existing approaches rule out interference among units, compromising validity when such effects are present. We develop a framework that accommodates contaminated…
We introduce a geodesic synthetic control method for causal inference that extends existing synthetic control methods to scenarios where outcomes are elements in a geodesic metric space rather than scalars. Examples of such outcomes include…
We examine the contribution of institutional integration to the institutional quality. To this end, we exploit the 2007 political crisis in Ukraine and examine the effects of staying out of the European Union for 28 Ukrainian provinces in…
The choice of protest tactics in a social movement has often been analyzed based on the demands, participants, and internal characteristics of the movement. However, recent evidence highlights the context or setting in which the…
Human migration patterns influence the redistribution of population characteristics over the geography and since such distributions are closely related to social and economic outcomes, investigating the structure and dynamics of internal…
Regional disparities in the economic and social structures of countries have a great impact on their development levels. In geographically, culturally and economically diverse countries like Turkiye, determining the socioeconomic status of…
We assess the broad repercussions of Yemen's 2011 revolution and subsequent civil war on its macroeconomic trajectories, human development, and quality of governance by constructing counterfactual benchmarks using a balanced panel of 37…
Social media represent powerful tools of mass communication and information diffusion. They played a pivotal role during recent social uprisings and political mobilizations across the world. Here we present a study of the Gezi Park movement…
Concerns about the integrity of Turkey's elections have increased with the recent transition from a parliamentary democracy to an executive presidency under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Election forensics tools are used to identify statistical…
Protest is ubiquitous in the 21st Century and the people who participate in such movements do so because they seek to bring about social change. However, social change takes time and involves repeated interactions between individual…
This article extends the widely-used synthetic controls estimator for evaluating causal effects of policy changes to quantile functions. The proposed method provides a geometrically faithful estimate of the entire counterfactual quantile…
We examine the effect of civil war in Syria on economic growth, human development and institutional quality. Building on the synthetic control method, we estimate the missing counterfactual scenario in the hypothetical absence of the armed…