This paper aims to show that culture is an important determinant of the effectiveness of formal democratic institutions, such as elections. We collect new data to document the presence of voluntary and social organizations and the history of electoral reforms in Chinese villages. We use the...

This paper aims to show that culture is an important determinant of the effectiveness of formal democratic institutions, such as elections. We collect new data to document the presence of voluntary and social organizations and the history of electoral reforms in Chinese villages. We use the...

The Stata package ebalance implements entropy balancing, a multivariate reweighting method described in Hainmueller (2011) that allows users to reweight a dataset such that the covariate distributions in the reweighted data satisfy a set of speci ed moment conditions. This can be useful to...

We develop an R package panelView and a Stata package panelview for panel data visualization. They are designed to assist causal analysis with panel data and have three main functionalities: (1) they plot the treatment status and missing values in a panel dataset; (2) they visualize variables of...

Difference-in-differences (DID) is commonly used for causal inference in time-series cross-section data. It requires the assumption that the average outcomes of treated and control units would have followed parallel paths in the absence of treatment. In this paper, I propose a method that not...

The performance of the Simple Poverty Scorecard is compared against the performance of established regression-based estimators. All estimates are benchmarked against observed poverty status based on household expenditure (or income) data from household socioeconomic surveys that span nearly a...

Recent debates over the relative importance of democracy and state capacity for human development have led to the prevailing view that a strong state must be built before the introduction of democracy. Our research challenges this ``sequencing approach'' in international development. Using a...

We introduce trajectory balancing, a general reweighting approach to causal inference with time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) data. We focus on settings in which one or more units is exposed to treatment at a given time, while a set of control units remain untreated throughout a time window of...

We introduce hierarchically regularized entropy balancing as an extension to entropy balancing, a reweighting method that adjusts weights for control group units to achieve covariate balance in observational studies with binary treatments. Our proposed extension expands the feature space by...

When COVID-19 first emerged in China, there was speculation that the outbreak would trigger public anger and weaken the Chinese regime. By analyzing millions of social media posts from Sina Weibo made between December 2019 and February 2020, we describe the content and sentiment of public,...