When can we trust government reports about civilian casualties or collateral damage in conflict? How does potential misreporting affect our study of conflict? @jess_stein84 and I explore these questions in a forthcoming paper @apsrjournal Details in thread

Very happy to see my work with Italo Colantone, Yotam Margalit, and Marco Percoco in First View at the APSR. How does the introduction of green policies with costs unevenly spread across society affect vote choices, as well as environmental behavior and attitudes? A thread 🧵:

The paper has more results, anecdotes, extensions, connections to other work. This is in progress, so comments and questions welcomed! Thanks already to feedback from Emory QTM, Caltech, and Germán Gieczewski at MPSA. https://t.co/6lj9we28NA

Here, misreporting is especially pernicious (not conditionally random): any variable that has a true causal effect also *directly* affects the misreporting probability. This is an equilibrium effect since the agent optimally conditions his misreporting strategy on behavior.

Eg: consider the effects of economic opportunity on crime. Even with exogenous variation, misreported data can over- or underestimate treatment effects. The problem is enforcement and reporting are intertwined. Policies directly affecting one will indirectly affect the other.

We also compute treatment effects (of changes in exogenous parameters) on both true and observed crime statistics. The difference between these two quantities is the effect of the treatment of equilibrium measurement error.

We show that an increase in the agent’s costs of manipulating data can backfire and increase equilibrium rates of measurement. With higher costs, the agent has more incentives to choose appropriate behavior, which makes her reports more credible.

We model an enforcement interaction between a police agent and a potential criminal, which produces a crime statistic, which then has to be reported by the agent. The key tension is that the agent may lie because it wishes to signal it choose appropriate enforcement behavior.

How institutional or environmental variables map onto misreporting incentives and how this affects inference is not well understood. It is difficult to study this empirically because we cannot compare the observed data to the truth. So theoretical models are particularly useful.

Evidence of manipulated crime statistics is difficult to gather, but anecdotes suggests that it is a salient problem. https://t.co/GHxYY6a8OH

Excited to post a new working paper: https://t.co/6lj9we28NA Twitterless Carlo Horz and I study the production of crime data and the implications of strategic misreporting for researchers and policymakers.

We are hosting the Formal Models of Conflict Conference in the fall! See below for the announcement. Deadline is in five weeks.

Very happy to share my new paper @AJPS_Editor! It's open access: https://t.co/HMZh0LOOez In recent decades, an increasing number of parties around the world have adopted primary elections. This paper develops a theory to explain why party leaders voluntarily use primaries 🧵

There's always a rush when removing a folder from sidebar after a class ends or a paper is sent out.

From the last issue of the QJPS: A thread about "Political Interventions in the Administration of Justice" by Carlo Horz and Hannah Simpson

Very exciting—my 🚨 article 🚨 with @BrentonKenkel is forthcoming at @IntOrgJournal! A 🧵 on “A Theory of External Wars and European Parliaments” https://t.co/LVuyKiQA1K

These are the stats for econ tenure track outcomes at Caltech since 2015: - Denied tenure: 1 - Left Caltech: 2 - Tenured: 5

This is a sweet paper and you should read it.

This project greatly benefitted from feedback by the reviewer, editors, @Ccrismancox, @EmielAwad, @BradSmithUNC, @CELoyle, @KathyAIngram, along with twitterless Phil Hoffman, Alex Hirsch, Federica Izzo, and Jin Yeub Kim. So thank you!

There is a direct effect: the NGO has more underreporting bias as investigations have less funds. There is an indirect effect: the government becomes less truthful because its coverups are less likely to be exposed. We show when the indirect effect dominates in Implication 1.

Surprisingly, as the cost of NGO effort increases, the NGO reports become less bias than the governments. See the right panel above. How can this be?