{"id":28419,"date":"2020-04-19T14:55:11","date_gmt":"2020-04-19T19:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=28419"},"modified":"2020-04-19T14:55:11","modified_gmt":"2020-04-19T19:55:11","slug":"synthetic-comparison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/04\/19\/synthetic-comparison\/","title":{"rendered":"Synthetic Comparison"},"content":{"rendered":"

This Vox<\/strong><\/em> article<\/a> on Alaska’s oil dividend, roughly equivalent to UBI,<\/strong><\/a> and its effect on human fertility, also details how social science researchers construct comparison entities when none is available:<\/p>\n

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Also in 2018,\u00a0UChicago\u2019s Damon Jones and UPenn\u2019s Ioana Marinescu<\/a>\u00a0found that the dividend does not deter people from working, and actually increases part-time work. Jones and Marinescu employed what\u2019s known in the social sciences as a \u201csynthetic control\u201d method. Basically, they combine a number of other states whose patterns of employment, part-time work, and related statistics roughly match Alaska\u2019s in the years before the policy was enacted. None of the states alone is a good comparison, but if you combine them carefully, you can come up with a \u201csynthetic Alaska\u201d for comparison.<\/p>\n

The new fertility paper, from Yonzan, Kelly, and Timilsina, also uses a synthetic control design. Because they\u2019re interested in fertility, not employment, they rely on states\u2019 fertility rates, average time between births, and abortion rates to construct synthetic controls whose trends matched those of Alaska before 1982.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Fascinating and clever. Of course …<\/p>\n

This is just one study, and there are some reasons for skepticism. Synthetic control studies are useful, but there\u2019s always a risk that the other states that make up the \u201ccontrol\u201d differed from Alaska in ways other than not having the dividend program. For the fertility rate comparison for 15- to 44-year-olds, the synthetic control is a weighted average of mostly Wyoming, a bit of Hawaii, and a very small bit of Washington, DC; these are all obviously quite different places from Alaska in ways that might influence fertility rates. That only matters for the analysis if they started to differ increasingly after 1982 but not before, but it\u2019s hard to rule out that possibility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Very interesting idea, and the caveats still apply for non-synthetic controls as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Vox article on Alaska’s oil dividend, roughly equivalent to UBI, and its effect on human fertility, also details how social science researchers construct comparison entities when none is available: Also in 2018,\u00a0UChicago\u2019s Damon Jones and UPenn\u2019s Ioana Marinescu\u00a0found that the dividend does not deter people from working, and actually \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28420,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28419\/revisions\/28420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}