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Today’s topic is to introduce Professor Scott Cunningham’s history of inspirational academic struggle and his 776-long "Causal Reasoning and Research Design" course slides. As for the books he wrote, we will introduce them to scholars together with other classic measurement books later.
1. How I changed from a poet to an empirical economist and
the cause and effect of writing this book may sound interesting. I took a tortuous path from poetry to economics to research. I fell in love with economics, and then fell in love with research. Causal reasoning is a constant in the whole process. But now it is a longer version.
I majored in English at the University of Tennessee undergraduate, and after graduation, I had the ambition to become a professional poet. However, when I successfully wrote poetry in college, I quickly realized that it might not be realistic to cross this path to success. What's more, I just got married not long ago, and I will have a child in the near future. In my work as a qualitative research analyst doing market research, slowly, I stopped writing poetry altogether.
As a qualitative research analyst, this job is an eye-opener, partly because it is my first exposure to empiricism. My job is to do "grounded theory"-an inductive method based on focus groups and in-depth interviews and other ethnographic methods to explain human behavior. I use each project as an opportunity to understand why people do what they do (even if what they do is buy detergent or choose a cable provider). Although this job inspired me to develop my own theory of human behavior, it did not provide me with a way to falsify these theories.
I lack background knowledge in social sciences, so I download and read articles from the Internet every night. One night, when I was immersed in the University of Chicago Law and Economics Working Paper series, a speech by Gary Becker caught my attention. That was his Nobel Prize-winning speech on how economics is applied to the analysis of all human behavior. After reading this speech, my life has completely changed. Before reading that speech, I thought economics was about stock markets and banks. I don't know that economics is an engine that can be used to analyze all human behavior. This is very exciting, and a seed has been planted in my heart.
But it wasn't until I read Lott and Mustard (1997) that I really became obsessed with economics. I don't know that there is such an empirical part-economists try to use quantitative data to estimate causal effects. One of the authors of Lott and Mustard (1997) is Mustard, then an associate professor of economics at the University of Georgia and one of Becker's former students. I decided to be a student of Mustard, so I applied for the Doctor of Economics program at the University of Georgia. My wife Paige and our youngest son Miles moved to Athens, Georgia, and started classes in the fall of 2002.
After passing the preparatory course, I attended Mustard's labor economics professional class and learned various topics that affect the life of labor economists. These topics include returns to education, inequality, racial discrimination, crime, and many other interesting and important topics. We read a lot of empirical papers in that course, and later learned that I need a strong econometric background to do the empirical work I want to do. Since econometrics is the most important field I can learn, I decided to make it my main research field. Therefore, I worked with Christopher Cornwell, an econometric economist in Georgia, and learned a lot from him. He became my most important mentor, as well as my collaborator and friend. Without him, there would be no where I am today.
Econometrics is difficult. I will not pretend to be a child prodigy. I participated in all econometrics courses offered by the University of Georgia, and some courses were attended more than once. They include probability statistics, cross-sections, panel data, time series data, and qualitative dependent variable analysis. However, when I passed the professional examination of econometrics, I did not understand econometrics on a deeper and more basic level. You might say that I only see the trees but not the forest.
When I was writing the third chapter of the thesis, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before. My third chapter is an investigation into the impact of the legalization of abortion on long-term risky sexual behavior (Cunningham and Cornwell, 2013). I read a book written by Levine (2004) when I was preparing for this research. In addition to reviewing abortion theory and empirical research, this book also has a small table explaining the double difference method DID. The University of Georgia has a traditional econometrics teaching method, and most of my professional courses are theoretical (for example, public and industrial organizations), so I have never really heard the term "identification strategy", let alone Say "causal inference". The double difference method table is eye-opening. I saw how to use econometric models to separate the causal effects of certain policies, which put me on a new research track.
2. In a letter to a Uruguayan student, he said:
I want to tell you why I like being an economist. I like being an economist because I am a curious person. Others will say that I am a "passionate" person. I just typed "intense" in Google Translate, and it says the Spanish translation is "intenso". Basically, I am passionate about the things I am interested in, and I feel bored with the things I am not interested in. Therefore, being a scholar is the most suitable for me. I started researching topics that I found interesting, writing about things I liked—even giving them to others, such as my mixtapes. I have a summer vacation to fly to places like Uruguay to give interesting lessons to interesting students like you. I can offer courses such as "Causal Reasoning" and "Crime Economics". I can do this while earning a fairly comfortable salary. With tenure, they can't fire me because I did something sinful (I promise I won't do it again!). I feel very lucky.
As an economist, I also like that economists have a place on the policy table. There is a "chief economic adviser" and an entire bureau dedicated to economic analysis and economic data. There are many central banks that employ many economists. The uniqueness of economists is that they are highly valued in government, academia, and industry. It allows you to flow in the international talent market and gives you good rewards. Perhaps most importantly, it provides you with the best opportunity, and the projects you have to work on are actually very important to the "good society". Significant. It is important that we use our talents and other resources and use them to the best of our ability to achieve the full prosperity of society. We should strive to improve the lives of everyone, including the most vulnerable. Although economics is only a small part of it, it is a meaningful field, perhaps a more meaningful academic field.
3. Causal Reasoning and Research Design (776 pages slides)
This course introduces students to the modern "causal inference" theory based on the Rubin causal model. In addition to learning several outstanding research designs in applied micrometrics (such as propensity score matching, double difference, breakpoint regression design, instrumental variables, synthetic control), students will also gain some abilities to use STATA for these research designs. Most of the time the class will focus on selection bias and treatment assignment.
Fellow scholars, you can download this 776-page slides yourself: https://www.scunning.com/teaching/lectures.pdf 
Extended reading
A few days ago, we introduced ① "200 articles used in empirical research, a toolkit for social science scholars", ②50 famous experience posts commonly used in empirical article writing, a series of must-read by students, ③AER in the past 10 years The Articles album on Chinese topics, ④AEA announced the top ten research topics that received the most attention in 2017-19, the direction for your topic selection, ⑤The key topic selection direction for Chinese Top journals in 2020, just write these for writing papers. Later, we introduced a collection of selected articles using CFPS, CHFS, CHNS data for empirical research! , ②These 40 micro-databases are enough for your Ph.D., anyway, relying on these libraries to become a professor, ③The most complete collection of shortcut keys in the history of Python, Stata, and R software! , ④ 100 selected Articles albums about (fuzzy) breakpoint regression design! , ⑤ 32 selected Articles of DID about the double difference method! , ⑥ 33 selected Articles of SCM about the synthesis control method! ⑦Compilation of the latest 80 papers about China's international trade field! ⑧Compilation of 70 recent economic papers on China's environmental ecology! ⑨A collection of selected articles using CEPS, CHARLS, CGSS, CLHLS database empirical research! ⑩Compilation of the last 50 papers using the system GMM to conduct empirical research! These articles have been welcomed and discussed by scholars.
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