Center for Effective Global Action

Research, 01/2021—05/2021, Berkeley, CA

During the Spring 2021 semester, I worked as a research apprentice through Berkeley’s URAP program at the Center for Effective Global Action. I worked under Dr. Fernando Hoces de la Guardia in the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) studying open source practices for policy analysis. Currently, policy analysts face few incentives to disclose their underlying data and computations, which makes it harder to have productive disputes. Open Policy Analysis seeks to apply reproducibility princples from the natural sciences to the policy realm.

My work involved two components. First, I assisted the completion of an example Open Policy Analyss of deworming interventions. I fixed issues with an R Shiny application and R Markdown report, all of which are available to the public on GitHub.

Next, I tested the Social Science Reproducibility Platform by conducting five reproductions, including:

  • Cutler and Summers (2020): A estimate of the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the United States.
  • Hamory et al. (2021): A study on the outcomes of early childhood deworming treatments.
  • Wu (2020): An analysis of online economics forums for gender-based discrimination.