Who is Scott Cunningham
Scott Cunningham is a professor of economics at Baylor University. He is the co-editor of The Handbook for the Economics of Prostitution with Oxford University Press. His career has focused primarily on the economics of risky behaviors, with a special focus on sex work, abortion policy, and crime. He lives in Waco, Texas with his family.
I originally produced this book (Causal Inference: The Mixtape) for my students. But in economics, books really aren’t rewarded, nor are they rewarded within my department. So I decided to just post the entire book to my website and then release it to Twitter, as I figured maybe someone else might find it helpful.
The book went viral. I think I probably have had something like 50,000 downloads or more. It’s fallen off, but I still get around 600 downloads a month.
So one day the University of Chicago wrote me and asked if we could get drinks at the annual econ conference, the ASSA. I was surprised and said sure. They said they wanted to publish it which was surprising. I had an agent for a different project (a more general-interest book on illegal markets, like sex and drugs), so I decided to invite her into this. She and I worked on a book proposal and then submitted it to a lot of publishers.
The project had conditions: for one, there had to remain a free version, as well as one for publication. Chicago and others dropped out, but two firms made me an offer, and I decided to go with Yale University Press. I spent late fall and spring heavily revising and expanding it.
Causal Inference: The Mixtape
Causal inference encompasses the tools that allow social scientists to determine what causes what.
Economists—who generally can’t run controlled experiments to test and validate their hypotheses—apply these tools to observational data to make connections.
In a messy world, causal inference is what helps establish the causes and effects of the actions being studied, whether the impact (or lack thereof) of increases in the minimum wage on employment, the effects of early childhood education on incarceration later in life, or the introduction of malaria nets in developing regions on economic growth.
Scott Cunningham introduces students and practitioners to the methods necessary to arrive at meaningful answers to the questions of causation, using a range of modeling techniques and coding instructions for both the R and Stata programming languages.
In addition to a hard copy book, Yale has graciously agreed to continue publishing a free online HTML version of the mixtape to my website. The free HTML version will be identical to the physical book but also include interactive R programming examples that can be run from the browser, which I think is pretty slick. It will be easy on the eyes and beautiful to gaze upon. If you like it, consider buying it, unless you’re willing to pay for the hard copy is less than $35, in which case don’t. Either way, the online HTML version is free and for the people.
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