The Laboratory for Comparative Social Research announces the next regular seminar, which will be held in Moscow (Krivokolenny Pereulok, 3, room 3-333) on December, 12 at 16-45 p.m. Kirill Chmel (Junior Research Fellow, Laboratory for Comparative Social Research) will deliver a report “Beyond Matching? Contemporary Methods and Approaches to Causal Inference”.

Standard methods and approaches to causal inference mostly comprise such techniques as Exact Matching, Difference-in-Difference, Regression Discontinuity and IV Method. Nowadays despite the fact that these methods remain one of the most popular among scholars, such challenges as big data, decreasing validity of secondary data, missing values, etc. sometimes question to what extent standard methods can be applied to new databases. Moreover, these challenges posit a number of issues with the validity of assumptions behind standard approaches and, eventually, hinder the estimation of causal effects. However, the expansion of computational capabilities, advances in the use of machine learning methods in the social sciences, and omnichannel data make the implementation of completely new methods for evaluating the causal effect real. In this presentation I cover modern approaches and methods of causal analysis like Semi-parametric DiD (Abadie, 2003), Synthetic Control Method (Abadie at. Al., 2010), Matrix Completion (Athey et. Al., 2018), etc. The presentation will be based on the 2019 Northwestern-Duke Causal Inference Advanced Workshops.

Everyone interested is invited!

Working language is English.

Videoconference with St. Petersburg office of the LCSR (room 303, 55-2, Sedova st.) will be provided. Guests from St. Petersburg are invited to make a request for a pass to the building to Olesya Volchenko (ovolchenko@hse.ru) by 12 am of the seminar’s day.

Guests from Moscow are invited to make a request for a pass to the building to Anastasia Ionova (aionova@hse.ru) by 12 am of the seminar’s day.