I’m running a short workshop at the Conservation Optimism conference on 21 April 2017. The workshop aims to demonstrate how background knowledge from different experts, both stakeholders and scientists, can be quantified and used to complement other data sources from more formal scientific studies. In the last 20 years, as Bayesian methods have flourished, statisticians […]
Understanding Hsiang and Sekar’s analysis
My previous post critiqued Hsiang and Sekar’s paper that claims that the legal sale of ivory in 2008 led to a sharp increase (or discontinuity) in elephant poaching between 2007 and 2008. Specifically for this post, the critique stated that their analyses were flawed. Following this Hsiang and Sekar published a response. Their replication files are also […]
Critique of Hsiang and Sekar paper linking legal ivory sale to an increase in illegal killing of elephants
There has been considerable attention on the paper released by Solomon Hsiang and Nitin Sekar on the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) website that claims that the sale of ivory to China in 2008 is the cause of the increase in illegal killing of elephants and demand for ivory. I looked at this paper with interest […]
