Hello everyone,
Our first meeting of the spring semester will be at 12pm (EST) Wednesday,
January 27 (tomorrow), where we will hear Guillaume Basse (Stanford
University) presents research on "Displacement Effects in a Hot Spot
Policing Intervention in Medellin: Inference and Pitfalls."
*Abstract: *
In hot policing, resources are targeted at specific locations predicted to
be at high risk of crime; so-called "hot spots." Rather than reduce overall
crime, however, there is a concern that these interventions simply displace
crime from the targeted locations to nearby non-hot spots. We address this
question in the context of a large-scale randomized experiment in Medellin,
Colombia, in which police were randomly assigned to increase patrols at a
subset of possible hotspots. Estimating the displacement effects on control
locations is difficult because the probability that a nearby hotspot is
treated is a complex function of the underlying geography. While existing
methods developed for this "general interference" setting, especially
Horvitz-Thompson (HT) estimators, have attractive theoretical properties,
they can perform poorly in practice and mislead practitioners. In this
talk, I explore the key pitfalls that practitioners should watch out for
when conducting this type of analysis, and propose some ways to partially
remedy them.
*Zoom link: *
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/97787602526?pwd=Uzh3bVVVS0F4TEVYQTJlV3BQNjcydz09
*Schedule of the workshop:*
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009
Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow!
Best,
Soichiro
--
Soichiro Yamauchi
PhD candidate
Harvard University
URL: https://soichiroy.github.io/