Center for Causal Inference Symposium

Date:

Thursday, June 24, 2021

Time:

10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. EDT/7:00 a.m. - 2 p.m. PDT

Overview

At the heart of policy analysis is cause and effect: How can we determine or quantify the actual impact of an action or policy? Without proper methods, recklessly inferring cause and effect from observed relationships can inform unhelpful policies at best, and dangerous ones at worst. More than ever, the research community needs the development and understanding of causal inference methods.

The 2021 RAND Center for Causal Inference (CCI) Inaugural Symposium, hosted by the RAND CCI, was a one-day interdisciplinary virtual symposium that offered researchers the opportunity to present and learn about cutting-edge causal inference research in statistics, econometrics, and other quantitative fields.

Program

All times below are Eastern U.S. Presenting authors are listed in italics.

10:00 a.m.
Opening remarks
10:05 a.m.
Varying impacts of letters of recommendation on college admissions: Approximate balancing weights for subgroup effects in observational studies
10:40 a.m.
Broken Instruments
11:15 a.m.
Break
11:25 a.m.
Targeting for Long-Term Outcomes
12:00 p.m.
A Method for Increasing Statistical Power in the Evaluation of Dilute Interventions
12:35 p.m.
Lunch Break
1:35 p.m.
RAND and the Center for Causal Inference
1:45 p.m.
Ananke: A Python Package For Causal Inference With Graphical Models
2:20 p.m.
Experimental Evaluation of Algorithm-Assisted Human Decision-Making: Application to Pretrial Public Safety Assessment
2:55 p.m.
Break
3:05 p.m.
Double Machine Learning-based Program Evaluation under Unconfoundedness
3:40 p.m.
Non-Random Exposure to Exogenous Shocks: Theory and Applications
4:15 p.m.
Break
4:20 p.m.
Minimax-Optimal Policy Learning Under Unobserved Confounding
4:55 p.m.
Dynamic Covariate Balancing: Estimating Treatment Effects over Time
5:30 p.m.
Closing

Presenters' Bios

John L. Adams is a professor of Health Systems Science at Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine.

Matthew Baird is codirector of the RAND Center for Causal Inference.

Eli Ben-Michael is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.

Rohit Bhattacharya is an incoming assistant professor of computer science at Williams College.

Trevor Gallen is an assistant professor of economics at Purdue University.

Peter Hull is an assistant professor in economics at the University of Chicago.

Kosuke Imai is a professor in the Department of Government and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University.

Michael Knaus is an assistant professor of econometrics at the Swiss Institute for Empirical Economic Research of the University of St. Gallen.

Layla Parast is codirector of the RAND Center for Causal Inference.

Davide Viviano is a Ph.D. student in economics at the University of California - San Diego.

Jeremy Yang is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Angela Zhou is a research fellow at the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley and incoming assistant professor at USC Marshall Data Sciences and Operations.

Discussants

Drew Anderson is an associate economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Jessie Coe (she/her) is an associate economist at RAND and a core faculty member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Maria DeYoreo is a statistician at the RAND Corporation.

Beth Ann Griffin is a senior statistician at the RAND Corporation.

Benjamin Miller is an economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.

Christine Mulhern is an associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation.

Evan Peet is an economist at the RAND Corporation and a Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty member.

Carter Price (he/him) is a senior mathematician at the RAND Corporation and codirector of the Center for Scalable Computing and Analysis.

David Powell is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and a member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty.

Brian Vegetabile is an associate statistician at RAND.

Questions?

For more information about CCI, visit our website or email us at causalinference@rand.org