Address 11/15 RP Seminar comments

Intro:

Audience did not like 'misallocation' wording and verbiage because I do not present an optimal spending benchmark to compare against.
Alternatives include 'political favoritism' and 'politically-influenced welfare weighting'. The point is fair in my opinion but `politically-influenced welfare weighting' is a mouthful

Data Description:

Audience wants to see spending per capita figures in the data
People want to see maps and distributions of spending categories as well
Junbiao in particular had some nice comments on this as he framed his thinking in terms of 'rates of return' on projects. I don't really have an objection to this framing but it may be something to discuss if I dig into the spending categories more
Audience: Would be good to consider state-level investment (I don't have the time to get that data, so I'll set this aside)
Audience: May be good to go into somewhat gory details of data processing for applications, shows drive and problem-solving skills.
Lots of curiosity about potential border design. One audience member mentioned Bordeu's JMP!

Bernie Stone Case Study:

The audience went wild for this, with audible gasps when I revealed the

My first comment is to put this case study on the front page of the paper as its "catchy"
Basically, everyone thought this was an extremely impressive part of the paper and made the case that this was a worthwhile and interesting project to do, regardless of the results

Results

Need to be clearer about sample
One recommendation for an TWFE approach where I weigh the treatment by the amount of support - this would allow me to increase my sample size by 5 times because I would be able to use every precinct
One recommendation for using a synthetic control design
One recommendation for DiD placebo tests
Multiple questions on the best way to interpret the treatment effect.
A lot of questions and recommendations afterward, overall people were very supportive and fairly impressed. I wasn't expecting people to be impressed - I thought people would be bored by how local the setting is.

JohnCRuf / alderman_machine