Tong Li publishes paper with former student Brantly Callaway
A paper by Tong Li and Brantly Callaway (PhD ’16), entitled “Evaluating Policies Early in a Pandemic: Bounding Policy Effects with Nonrandomly Missing Data,” is forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics. In this paper, the authors develop new methods of dealing with nonrandomly missing data for policy evaluation and apply the methods to assess the effects of Tennessee’s open testing policy in early pandemic. They find that the policy was effective in saving lives, as the policy reduced the number of actual COVID cases in the state by at least 8000 by May 9, 2020, relative to what they would have been in the absence of the policy. This paper was recently featured by Vanderbilt’s Research News page.