Thoughts from Salem Center’s David Puelz: Understanding cause-and-effect is crucial to policy analysis. A new article published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society aims to make causal methods more useful by incorporating “interference.” Interference is everywhere in our modern world and describes natural clusterings of experimental units: family members interact with others in […]
Impacts of Lockdowns on COVID Death Rates and Employment
As the American presidential draws near, it is time to discuss one of the key talking points in this campaigning season: COVID-19 lockdown policies. Taking data from the CDC, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and WalletHub’s COVID Restriction Score, the Policy Research Lab has created the following plots to analyze the Lockdown and COVID […]
Jay Bhattacharya: COVID-19 Interview
Jay Battacharya is a Professor of Economics and Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. Hear what Jay Bhattacharya, Professor, has to say about the pandemic at hand. Watch the interview on YouTube:
Why the Texas Employment Recovery is even BETTER than the Official Numbers Say
In mid-May, the Chicago Booth Review published an article, Why US unemployment is even worse than the official numbers say, in which they discuss what happened to the labor force at the beginning of the recession in terms of unemployment rates, labor force participation rates, and so on. As COVID policies have been relaxed, we […]
Unemployment Claims in the State of Texas: COVID-19 Data Work and Research
Co-Author: Thatcher Thornberry Unemployment Claims are requests for cash benefits after getting laid off from a job. When a person makes an unemployment claim, they are seeking temporary benefits from their state government to support them during their time out of work. This metric can be very useful in times of economic crisis because it […]
Emily Oster: COVID-19 Interview
Emily Oster is a Professor of Economics at Brown University. She holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard. Prior to being at Brown she was on the faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School. Hear what Emily Oster, Professor, has to say about the pandemic at hand. Watch the interview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J-ew7T4tx8A
Bryan Caplan: COVID-19 Interview
Bryan Caplan is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. He specializes in public economics, public choice, psychology and economics, public opinion, economics of the family and education, genoeconomics, and Austrian economics. Hear what Bryan Caplan, Research Fellow, has to say about the pandemic at hand. […]
Amesh Adalja: COVID-19 Interview
Professional Profile Dr. Adalja is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. His work is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity. Dr. Adalja has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings and the […]
COVID-19 Data Work and Research
As COVID-19 has driven a lot of local and state policies over the last five months, the Salem Center has dedicated a large amount of our research hours to contribute to this conversation. The mission of our project has been to gather information about large areas of economic activity in Texas. We also started with […]