Exercises completed in R from Imai's "Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction"
The 2011 Russian election for state legislature was tainted by allegations of tampering predicated upon one of nature's spookiest phenomena: Benford's law, which maintains that some digits naturally occur more frequently than others throughout collections of data. Extending principles of Benford's law, this project investigates the likelihood that election fraud actually occurred in the 2011 election.
The United States Constitution has long been characterized by scholars as an archetype upon which the founding documents of other nations have been based. Is this really true, and how has the influence of the Constitution on other founding documents grown or waned over time? This project utilizes principles of natural language processing to examine textual similarities and networks of influence among constitutional preambles across the globe.
Can betting markets and polling obey the efficient market hypothesis and accurately predict election outcomes? This project examines whether polling results and online betting data from Intrade correctly forecast Barack Obama's victories in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.
In public and behind closed doors, the struggle for ideological and geopolitical power between the United States and the Soviet Union was always contentious. This project uses UN voting data to explore how the member state support for U.S. and Soviet/Russian positions has shifted since the end of communism.
Small class sizes have long been thought to improve student performance. This project analyzes data from the STAR program to determine whether race- and participation-based breakdowns of student performance point to a positive influence of small kindergarten classes on exam outcomes and graduation rate.
Demography provides crucial insights that guide a variety of studies and policies across the social sciences, from economics to urbanism. This project explores fundamental metrics measuring population dynamics in Kenya, Sweden, and around the world.