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Big Data and Public Policy Workshop Agenda
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Big Data and Public Policy Workshop
Thank you to our workshop sponsors:
Keynote Speaker - Brett Goldstein
Brent Goldstein was appointed by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to be the first municipal Chief Data Officer in 2011. In this role, he led successful efforts to use data to improve the way city government serves its residents and established one of the largest open data programs in the country.
In 2012, Goldstein also assumed the role of Chief Information Officer for the City of Chicago, where he worked to accelerate Chicago's growth as a global hub of innovation and technology, adopting modern technology to save taxpayer funds, creating a robust collaboration with Chicago's developer community and integrating data analytics into everyday government operations. Goldstein began his career in the start-up sector, spending 7 years at OpenTable. Click here for Brett's full bio
The new availability of data – administrative records, mobile devices, sensors, and many private sources – as well as new processing and analytical techniques, has the potential to transform the practice of science. In the social science context, the new data can potentially offer information for policy-makers that is much more current, granular and richer in environmental information than data produced by statistical agencies from surveys. Yet with the unfolding of new research opportunities, there are challenges associated with making use of the new data that are no longer generated and disseminated by statistical agencies, but can be harvested from many individual public, and some private, actions.
Examples of particular challenges for the policy community include:
Inadequate understanding of coverage, incentive and quality issues, together with the lack of a comparison group, can lead to incorrect policy advice. For example, overreliance on, say, Twitter data, in targeting resources after hurricanes might lead to the misallocation of resources towards young, internet savvy people with cell-phones and away from elderly or impoverished neighborhoods.
The lack of obvious data stewards who can be entrusted with preserving confidentiality, which can result in questions about the ethical use of new types of data. For example, since there are no clear rules or guidelines governing the appropriate use of the new types of data, Institutional Review Boards may hesitate to allow new types of research.
Nonetheless, important scholarly work has been done that uses big data in a way that is valuable to policy makers – in areas as varied as finance, labor, education, science, innovation, transportation and development. This JPAM workshop seeks to assess as well as showcase cutting edge empirical work in this vein.
Registration for this workshop opens on July 15. The registration fee of $45 for Members and $65 for Nonmembers is not included in the conference registration fee.
Welcome & Introductions
Twitter-Based Public Discourse On Health Reform
Robert S Gold, University of Maryland College Park; Virginia Kotzias, University of Maryland College Park
Is Public Grading Worth the Costs? An Evaluation of New York City's Restaurant Grades Policy
Rachel Meltzer, The New School; Michah W. Rothbart, New York University; Amy Ellen Schwartz, New York University and Syracuse University; Thad Calabrese, New York University; Diana Silver, New York University; Tod Mijanovich, New York University; Meryle Weinstein, New York University
The Geography, Incidence, and Underreporting of Gun Violence: New Evidence using ShotSpotter Data
Jennifer L. Doleac, University of Virginia; Jillian B. Carr, Purdue University
Concurrent Sessions: Applications
There will be a coffee break midway through this session.
Urban Policy and Education
Daytime Travel in Spatial Mismatch: Job Accessibility and Employment at Reentry
Naomi Sugie, UC Irvine; Michael Lens, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
Why Don't Housing Choice Voucher Recipients Live Near Better Schools? Insights from Experimental and Big Administrative Data
Ingrid Ellen, New York University; Keren Horn, University of Massachusetts at Boston; Amy Ellen Schwartz, New York University and Syracuse University
The Challenge of Teacher Retention in Urban Schools: Evidence of Variation from a Cross-Site Analysis
John P. Papay, Brown University; Andrew Bacher-Hicks, Harvard University; Lindsay C. Page, University of Pittsburgh; William H. Marinell, Harvard University
Marginal Beyond Action: Interpersonal Interaction, Peer Effects, and College Online Courses
Eric Bettinger, Stanford University; Jing Liu, Stanford University Susanna Loeb, Stanford University;
Health and other Issues
Learning from Big Clinical Data: Problems and Solutions for Policy Analysis
Sara R. Jordan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Predictors of Colorectal Cancer Screening in the U.S.: A Multilevel, Population Perspective
Lee Mobley, Georgia State University; Tzy-Mey Kuo, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; Jeffrey Traczynski, University of Hawaii at Manoa; Victoria Udalova, University of Wisconsin; Julia Koschinsky, Arizona State University
Empowering Consumers through Data and Smart Technology: Experimental Evidence on the Consequences of Time-of-Use Electricity Pricing Policies
Matthew Harding, Duke University; Carlos Lamarche, University of Kentucky
Big Data, Vertical Integration, and Competitive Advantage in the Entertainment Industries
Michael D. Smith, Carnegie Mellon University; Rahul Telang, Carnegie Mellon University
Concurrent Sessions:
From Epistemology to Public Policy: Checks and Balances on the Use of Big Data in Policy Analysis
Amy Castro Baker, University of Pennsylvania; Maria Y. Rodriguez, University of Washington
What Works for Whom? A Bayesian Approach to Channeling Big Data Streams for Policy Analysis
Mariel Finucane, Mathematica Policy Research; Ignacio Martinez, Mathematica Policy Research; Scott Cody, Mathematica Policy Research
The AOS: Building the Evidence Base for Studying Policy and Program Impacts on Human Outcomes and Socio-Economic Mobility
David Grusky, Stanford University; Timothy Smeeding, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Matt Snipp, Stanford University
Bringing Big Data into Public Policy Research: Text Mining to Acquire Richer Data on Program Participants, Their Behavior and Services
Robert Goerge, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago; Jonathan Ozik, Computation Institute, University of Chicago; Nicholas Collier, Computation Institute, University of Chicago
Text Data Analytics: A Methodological Review and Demonstration
Beth-Anne Schuelke-Leech, Ohio State University; Betsy Barry, Illocution Inc.; Clayton Darwin, Illocution Inc.
Patterns of Policy - A Computational Analysis of Legal Citations
Anne L. Washington, George Mason University
Keynote Speaker: Brett Goldstein, University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy; Ron Jarmin, U.S. Census Bureau, Assistant Director, Research and Methodology Directorate