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Meetings: Wednesdays, 12pm-2pm, SSB104

Syllabus

Current Quarter: Winter 2026

January 14: Peter Enns, Cornell University. "How a Seemingly Innocuous and Intuitive Methodological Choice Confused a Generation of Research on Policy Responsiveness". Paper HERE. Discussant: Henry Mo, PEB520

January 28: Naijia Liu, Harvard University. "Measuring Ideological Variation in Large Language Models". Discussant: XIaohan Wu., SSB104. Paper HERE. Abstract HERE.

February 11: Carlos Cinelli, University of Washington. "Long Story Short: Omitted Variable Bias in Causal Machine Learning". Paper HERE. Discussant: Naho Ohta, SSB104

February 25: Mengyuan Hao, 2nd year paper presentation, SSB104

March 11: Annie Lim, 2nd year paper presentation, SSB104

Spring 2026

April 8th: Henry Mo, 2nd year paper presentation, SSB104

April 22nd: Umberto Mignozzetti, SSB104

May 6th: Benjamin Schneer, PEB721

May 20:

June 3rd:

Pending: Ross Schaap, Head of Research, GeoQuant

Past Quarters

Fall 2025

October 10: Discussion of the Methods Field and Planning Session

October 24: Molly Roberts, presenting, "Propaganda is already influencing large language models: evidence from training data, audits, and real-world usage," Hannah Waight, Eddie Yang, Yin Yuan, Solomon Messing, Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart, Joshua A. Tucker

November 7: Henry Ma, leading discussion of:

Paper 1 (primary focus): Aronow, Peter M., and Cyrus Samii. "Does regression produce representative estimates of causal effects?." American Journal of Political Science 60, no. 1 (2016): 250-267.
Paper 2 (supplementary): Coppock, Alexander, Thomas J. Leeper, and Kevin J. Mullinix. "Generalizability of heterogeneous treatment effect estimates across samples." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 49 (2018): 12441-12446.

November 21: Hennes-Michel Barnehl, "DETECTING CONFLICT EVENTS WITH SATELLITE DATA". Paper HERE.

December 5: Xiaohan Wu, job market paper