Daniel E. Ho’s research while affiliated with Stanford Medicine and other places

What is this page?


This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.

Publications (27)


Test Sub Dan H. Only Author #2
  • Article

July 2012

·

4 Reads

SSRN Electronic Journal

Daniel E. Ho

Test Sub Dan H. Only Author #2Test Sub Dan H. Only Author #2Test Sub Dan H. Only Author #2







Credible Causal Inference for Empirical Legal Studies

December 2011

·

50 Reads

·

49 Citations

Annual Review of Law and Social Science

We review advances toward credible causal inference that have wide application for empirical legal studies. Our chief point is simple: Research design trumps methods of analysis. We explain matching and regression discontinuity approaches in intuitive (nontechnical) terms. To illustrate, we apply these to existing data on the impact of prison facilities on inmate misconduct, which we compare to experimental evidence. What unifies modern approaches to causal inference is the prioritization of research design to create -- without reference to any outcome data -- subsets of comparable units. Within those subsets, outcome differences may then be plausibly attributed to exposure to the treatment rather than control condition. Traditional methods of analysis play a small role in this venture. Credible causal inference in law turns on substantive legal, not mathematical, knowledge.


MatchIT: Nonparametric Preprocessing for Parametric Causal Inference
  • Article
  • Full-text available

June 2011

·

2,326 Reads

·

4,238 Citations

Journal of Statistical Software

MatchIt implements the suggestions of Ho, Imai, King, and Stuart (2007) for improving parametric statistical models by preprocessing data with nonparametric matching methods. MatchIt implements a wide range of sophisticated matching methods, making it possible to greatly reduce the dependence of causal inferences on hard-to-justify, but commonly made, statistical modeling assumptions. The software also easily fits into existing research practices since, after preprocessing data with MatchIt, researchers can use whatever parametric model they would have used without MatchIt, but produce inferences with substantially more robustness and less sensitivity to modeling assumptions. MatchIt is an R program, and also works seamlessly with Zelig.

Download

Table 1: Illustration of " partisan effects " in federal court of appeals decisions. 6 
Figure 1: Schematic representation of a simple spatial theory of voting. A voter has preferences, represented by a utility function, over policy alternatives, which are represented by points on the horizontal axis. The voter's most preferred policy position is referred to as her ideal point. When confronted with a choice between a status quo policy and an alternative policy, the voter compares the utility of voting for each alternative and votes for the option that provides higher utility. A probabilistic version of the model is also possible; in such a version, the probability of voting for the alternative policy decreases as the distance between that alternative policy and the voter's ideal point increases relative to the distance of the status quo policy from the ideal point.
Table 2: Illustration of " partisan effects " in hypothetical voter survey. 
Figure 2: Estimating latent "intelligence" dimension from standardized test. Each panel represents a hypothetical test question that induces different responses. The x-axis represents the latent dimension of intelligence. The y-axis represents the probability of a correct answer, ranging from 0 to 1. The grey dots are the observed answers by fifty test takers, coded as 1 if correct and 0 if incorrect. The red curve plots the relationship between intelligence and test answers. The left panel (a) shows an indiscriminate test question, with a slope of the relationship between intelligence and answers close to 0. The middle panel (b) represents a question that discriminates quite well between more and less intelligent test takes. The slope is sharply positive, and the only test takers incorrectly answering the question are at the low end of the latent dimension. The four panels on the right display other types of test questions. From top left, clockwise: (c) a hard, indiscriminate question no one answers correctly; (d) an easy, indiscriminate question everyone answers correctly; (e) a poor question that intelligent test takers overthink and therefore are more likely to answer incorrectly; (f) an easy, weakly discriminating question that less intelligent student have a low probability of answering incorrectly.
Figure 3: Modeling the probability of judicial votes as a function of a latent dimension. The greyor dots depict the observed votes of each Justice on the y-axis and the estimated ideological location on the x-axis. The white lines (with 95 percent credibility bands) represent the estimated probability of voting with the majority as a function of the latent dimension. Blakely, in the left panel, presents an atypical voting coalition with a slope close to 0, and therefore contributes little information about ideal points. Gratz, on the other hand, has a sharply positive slope, permitting an inference that the ideal points of Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Souter are separated from those of Justices Breyer, O'Connor, Kennedy, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas. Grutter similarly separates Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, and O'Connor from Justices Kennedy, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas.

+9

How Not to Lie with Judicial Votes: Misconceptions, Measurement, and Models

June 2010

·

501 Reads

·

52 Citations

California Law Review


Reconciling Punitive Damages Evidence

March 2010

·

10 Reads

·

1 Citation

Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics JITE

This comment on EISENBERG, HEISE, AND WELLS [2010] (henceforth EHW), explores how comparable data may have engendered sharply divergent views about punitive damages as (a) predictable or (b) erratic. Matched case control sampling provides an avenue to efficiently augment existing data with a key missing measure of the egregiousness of defendant conduct. I illustrate with a pilot study in Santa Clara County of the relationship between egregiousness and punitive damages.


Citations (19)


... Dezessete estudos utilizaram entrevistas e 13 usaram questionários. Em 11 pesquisas foram utilizadas observações, destacando-se duas etnografias (Fagan & Malkin, 2002;Hara, 2007), sendo que Hara (2007) A inovação na perspectiva político-legal foi compreendida de diferentes formas: combinação de métodos de tratamento de drogas com processamento criminal (Goldkamp, 1994); reformas de procedimentos judiciais (Goodman, Quas, Bulkley, & Shapiro, 1999); mensurações de ideologias no processo de escolha de juízes para instâncias superiores (Giles, Hettinger, & Peppers, 2001); métodos de avaliação patrimonial por juízes (Chen, Yee, & Yoo, 2010); evolução da doutrina de discriminação sexual no ambiente de trabalho (Moyer & Tankersley, 2012); desenvolvimento e implementação de justiça comunitária como legitimação do Judiciário (Fagan & Malkin, 2002); criação de tribunais específicos, como o de drogas e de saúde mental, que atendem com consultas e assistência (Trawver & Rhoades, 2012); difusão de inovações jurídicas (Lutz, 1997); "táticas de inovação", entendidas como a criação de requisitos legais inovadores, ativismo e iniciativa (He, 2013); interação de estabilidade e mudança e a relação entre criação de legislação pelo congresso e aplicação pelos tribunais (Barnes, 2008); e evolução histórica de uma doutrina (Ho & Ross, 2009 A análise dos aspectos administrativos no Judiciário teve como interesse os tipos e as fontes de conflito no desempenho do trabalho de gestores de tribunais (Mays & Taggart, 1986), gestão de desempenho (Pekkanen & Niemi, 2013;Schneider, 2004), parcerias entre tribunais e outras organizações (Kent, 2005), análise de melhores práticas de gestão (Binford, Greene, Schmidlkofer, Wilsey, & Taylor, 2007), accountability judicial e gerencial (Contini & Mohr, 2007), percepção de cultura (Matz, Adams, & Williamson, 2011), métodos de resolução de conflitos (Kovač, 2013) e gestão da imagem (Wu, 2013). os tribunais podem produzir mais com os recursos atuais; (b) as variáveis independentes tiveram coeficientes de regressão positivos com desempenho, com exceção de rotatividade de juízes; (c) alcançar alta produção e baixa taxa de recursos não são objetivos incompatíveis. ...

Reference:

Inovação e desempenho na administração judicial: desvendando lacunas conceituais e metodológicas
Did Liberal Justices Invent the Standing Doctrine? An Empirical Study of the Evolution of Standing, 1921-2006
  • Citing Article
  • April 2009

SSRN Electronic Journal

... All analyses were conducted using RStudio. We started our analysis by estimating the propensity scores using the MatchIt package (Ho et al., 2011). Once we decided the estimation procedure, we continued with the linear regression models to estimate the effect of grade retained on math, science, reading and math self-efficacy. ...

Matching as Nonparametric Preprocessing for Improving Parametric Causal Inference
  • Citing Article
  • January 2007

Political Analysis

... 15 In extended models, it also includes a control group category constructed using a matching procedure. In addition, see section E in the Supplementary Information (SI) for a power analysis and a randomisation inference test, that allows to show whether the specific randomisation we analyse compares to a set of all possible random assignments that could have taken place (Fisher 1935;Ho and Imai 2006). ...

Randomization Inference With Natural Experiments
  • Citing Article
  • September 2006

... The core assumption of this approach-common to many approaches for quantifying political valence on social media (e.g., Barberá 2015)-is that behavior reflects revealed preferences. This is agnostic to the substance of the content in question, in contrast with methods that infer the slant of a given story or source based on its text (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010;Ho and Quinn 2008). 4 This can make reputations self-fulfilling. ...

Measuring Explicit Political Positions of Media

Quarterly Journal of Political Science

... How does candidate order on the ballot affect voting behavior and election results? Ballot order effects have important implications for ballot design, candidate selection, and intra-party competition in American and comparative politics (Ho and Imai 2008;Marcinkiewicz and Stegmaier 2015;Ortega Villodres 2008). Previous research suggests that candidates in the first and last positions tend to receive more votes than other candidates (Alvarez, Sinclair, and Hasen 2006), focusing on first-past-the-post (Ho and Imai 2008) and party-list proportional representation (Gulzar, Robinson, and Ruiz 2022). ...

Estimating Causal Effects of Ballot Order From a Randomized Natural Experiment: The California Alphabet Lottery, 1978-2002
  • Citing Article
  • June 2008

Public Opinion Quarterly

... Our findings have implications for the design of recommendation systems and Web portals (see also Ho & Quinn, 2008) and suggest that the best architecture-one that could help consumers make better, that is, more consistent, choices-would tailor the presentation mode of recommendations (numerical or verbal) to the expected recommendation format of the consumers. Olson and Budescu (1997) and, more recently, Du, Budescu, Shelley and Omer (2011) have shown, in different contexts, that DMs' preferences for information format are driven, at least, in part by their expectations about the nature of the target events. ...

Improving the Presentation and Interpretation of Online Ratings Data with Model-based Figures: Longer Version with Additional Tables and Figures
Daniel E Ho

·

·

Troy Dearmitt

·

[...]

·

Garth Sheldon-Coulson

... Much of this work is, understandably, related to the specific legal frameworks that exist in the respective regions, for example, the Administrative Procedure Act in the United States and the growing body of case law and administrative acquis in the European Union. Although much of the legal literature is normative or qualitative, an increasing number of studies use quantitative techniques to assess the impact of regulatory and other laws(Ho & Quinn 2009;O'Connell 2011O'Connell , 2015. ...

The Role of Theory and Evidence in Media Regulation and Law: A Response to Baker and a Defense of Empirical Legal Studies

... As the designers of these methods themselves point out, they take the case docket as given, when in fact the justices have substantial discretion over the cases they hear. It is not possible to detect if justices as a whole are moving ideologically or if the docket has changed-that is, if the justices simply hear more conservative or more liberal cases over time (12). ...

How Not to Lie with Judicial Votes: Misconceptions, Measurement, and Models

California Law Review

... Which types of intellectual property rules favour innovation? Over the past several decades, the credibility revolution which swept through empirical economics [141] has also made its way into legal studies [142]. In a manner akin to evidence based medicine, the use of empirical models and methods has increasingly become part of mainstream legal scholarship. ...

Credible Causal Inference for Empirical Legal Studies
  • Citing Article
  • December 2011

Annual Review of Law and Social Science