I am very pleased to announce that Yiqing Xu of MIT is the 2014 winner of the Society for Political Methodology's John T. Williams Dissertation Prize. Please join me in congratulating him on this prestigious honor.

The citation from the award committee (Curt Signorino (chair), John Ahlquist, and Jennifer Jerit) is the following:

The first chapter and main methodological contribution of Xu's dissertation is the development of a new method for causal inference in time-series cross-sectional data, which he refers to as the “Generalized Synthetic Control Method.”  As the name implies, the method generalizes the synthetic control method (Abadie et al. 2010) to multiple treatment units and to variable treatment periods.  It also unifies linear fixed effects models and difference-in-differences estimators as special cases. Compared to those existing methods, Xu's method often improves both robustness and efficiency, which he demonstrates analytically and via simulations.  Subsequent chapters of Xu’s dissertation apply this new method to empirical questions in Chinese political economy.

Please join me in thanking the award committee as well as the many individuals who submitted nominations for this award.

KQ

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Kevin Quinn
Professor of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law
490 Simon #7200
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720-7200
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President 
The Society for Political Methodology
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