National Science Foundation

The PI proposes investigating the education production function in the context of an informal community based model of instruction targeted at out-of-school children in India. Using the planned expansion of the program, the PI will conduct a three part randomization that will allow us to distinguish the effects of student, teacher, classmate, and non-class peers on student achievement while also generally evaluating the effectiveness of community based class model. The evaluation design comprises three randomizations.

The emergence of the primary election process during the 20th Century is widely thought to have transformed American politics. For example, primary elections allegedly weakened political parties and fueled the rise of personalistic, incumbency oriented politics; and primary elections are though to have made politicians much more ideologically extreme than the electorate as a whole, because candidates must first win approval of a partisan subset of the electorate before they can even qualify for the general election.

The second half of the 20th century saw a shift from an international system in which acts of mass extreme behavior were considered unpunishable to one in which they are generally viewed as criminally culpable conduct. When events become public, the states where they occur are now beset by calls to either prosecute those responsible or allow an international court to do so.

The project develops a new strategy to explain and measure scientific consensus formation. It develops a quantitative measure of scientific consensus, based on an analysis of the structure of scientific citation networks. The measure is validated by exploiting changing consensus levels across time regarding several scientific propositions, such as "smoking causes cancer", "Human activity causes a climate change", etc.