# Talk:Guido Imbens

This review is transcluded from Talk:Guido Imbens/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: Shushugah (talk · contribs) 17:27, 9 January 2022 (UTC)


### Beginning review
Hello I am looking forward to reviewing your article today and working with you. I typically give a week for any corrections to be made and make my final assessment then. I will provide a progress bar and more descriptive feedback to help you make improvements. Kind regards ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 17:27, 9 January 2022 (UTC)

The article is nearly in a perfect state. I have a couple of prose/grammar nitpick listed below. 

He has been Professor of Economics should be He has been a professor of Economics, though I see enough variations on Wikipedia of both.
Imbens was elected a foreign -> Imbens was elected as a foreign
Given the highly technical/economic focus of this article, concepts like Unearned income, Education economics (for college education or additional years of education on earnings), labor supply, machine learning/Random forest,  should all be wiki linked. Econmetrics should be wiki linked earlier. Redundant wikilinks in this case may be warranted.


#### Citations
The citations are high quality, but some paragraphs are missing them. 
For example this paragraph:

Imbens graduated with a Candidate's degree (equivalent to a Bachelor's degree) in Econometrics from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1983. He subsequently obtained an MSc degree with distinction in Economics and Econometrics from the University of Hull in Kingston upon Hull, UK in 1986. is missing references. The following paragraph's references would be suitable, e.g. his personal vitae per WP:ACADEMIC
Similarly with this paragraph In one of the real-world applications of the model that would have implications for policymakers, Imben partnered with statistician Donald Rubin and economist Bruce Sacerdote to study the impact of unearned earnings on labor supply. The group studied the implications of policy interventions such as Universal Basic Income or other federal and state wage assistance programs on citizens' willingness to participate in the labor force and the eventual impact on labor supply. it would benefit from having references that are attached in the following paragraph namely Imbens, Guido W.; Rubin, Donald B.; Sacerdote, Bruce I. (2001). "Estimating the Effect of Unearned Income on Labor Earnings, Savings, and Consumption: Evidence from a Survey of Lottery Players". The American Economic Review. 91 (4): 778–794. ISSN 0002-8282.
In this paragraph More recently, he (along with Prof. Susan Athey) has been working on using machine learning methods, particularly modifications to random forests called causal forests to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in causal inference models.  there the references should be moved to the end, rather than in the middle of the paragraph (along with adding wiki links to forest trees and machine learning). 
I couldn't find any freely licensed photos of Imbens, and the other photos are relevant/freely licensed. Given this his wife is a professor herself and co-authored a paper, I didn't think it was WP:UNDUE to include her, but others may disagree with me. This article is practically a good article already and I'd have directly made these changes, but wanted to hear from you first. Happy editing/reviewing! ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 18:08, 9 January 2022 (UTC)


### Status query
Filetime, where does this nomination stand? I don't see that you've addressed any of the issues that Shushugah raised, even though it has been seven weeks since the review was posted. Are you planning to work on them soon? If not, perhaps the nomination should be closed. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:30, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

@BlueMoonset: All of the issues have been addressed. I remain unsuccessful in finding a freely licensed image of Imbens of requisite quality. While this[1] lecture has been released under a CC license, the video from Imbens' camera never occupies more than a tiny portion of the screen, making extracting a good quality still impossible. Filetime (talk) 22:56, 28 February 2022 (UTC)


### Second opinion requested in the hopes of finding reviewer to take over
Regrettably, Shushugah has been inactive of late and unresponsive to queries. The nomination status has been changed to "2nd opinion" in the hopes of finding a new reviewer to take over the review. Thank you to whoever steps up. BlueMoonset (talk) 04:02, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

I'll take over the review. Should be done by the end of the week.
First comments: the article looks good on the surface. It's well-written, no copyright problems.  I've started checking for text-source integrity, and found two possible errors
The Volkskrant article doesn't include a date of birth
I found it hard to verify "Winners of $80,000 a year for 20 years reduced their working hours somewhat, but winners of $15,000 a year for 20 years did not. Among unemployed persons who played the lottery, winners worked more than non-winners in the six years after playing". I spent ten minutes reading the scientific article, but I couldn't find those exact numbers. Is it a WP:routine calculation?
And one prose nitpicking thing: fellow economist Susan Athey since 2002. Athey is a fellow economist -> instead of twice the word fellow, you can maybe name her specialty. Femke (talk) 17:38, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
Could you add a second paragraph to the lede? I think the quote from the Nobel Prize is a bit too jargonny and it would be good if it can be supplemented by a plain explanation of what his research entails. (per WP:MTAU). Femke (talk) 20:11, 24 March 2022 (UTC)
A lot of the contextualising is done with a non-independent source (That Stanford piece). As Stanford may have some motivation to boast about their own researcher, an independent source is preferred for these type of statements:
The methodologies have been useful for researchers to analyze research problems as diverse as studying the impact of new regulations on economic activity and on new drug effectiveness on patients. ("as diverse as" doesn't feel 100% neutral to me)
"The paper and the model had significant impact on other research efforts across econometrics, statistics and other fields"
I'm placing the article on hold. Let me know if seven days is enough to tackle those issues. Femke (talk) 17:18, 26 March 2022 (UTC)

@Filetime: I was wondering if you've seen the rest my review, and when you think you'll have time to further improve the article. Femke (talk) 19:57, 1 April 2022 (UTC)
@Femkemilene:, how does this look? Filetime (talk) 22:48, 3 April 2022 (UTC)
Better :). Did you manage to verify that claim of unemployed people working more? It would be great for a WP:DYK if it can be verified. A page number would help here.
(pet peeve, ignore if you disagree, but can utilise be changed to use?) Femke (talk) 15:59, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
@Femkemilene:— It seems this information came from a working paper of the same title published in 1999, rather than 2001. The two relevant quotes are:
"We find that winning a modest prize ($15,000 per year for twenty years) does not affect labor supply or earnings substantially" (p. 2) and
"There is some evidence that for those with zero earnings prior to winning the lottery there is a positive effect of winning a small prize on subsequent labor force participation." (p. 2)
I just added the source in addition to changing "utilized" Filetime (talk) 13:47, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

  The article does not qualify for DYK since it has been featured on the Main Page's In the news section before. See please DYK reviewing guide. CeeGee 12:16, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

The article currently reiterates the following claim from a press release:

By drawing on natural experiments, the LATE model [it's actually not a statistical model per se] helped Imbens and others examine causal phenomena and address important issues facing the public and policymakers. For example, in order to study the effects of unearned income on labor supply, Imbens looked at evidence from an actual lottery to determine whether unearned income changed incentives for people to work.With Donald Rubin of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth, Imbens surveyed people who played the lottery in Massachusetts [...]
It's not clear to me how the Local Average Treatment Effect concept was used in this study. It seems that the term isn't even mentioned in the paper (nor does it cite the 1994 Imbens & Angrist paper that introduced the concept). And who exactly are the compliers, always-takers, never-takers and defiers in this situation? Non-compliance in the sense of a lottery winner not accepting their winnings doesn't seem to have been an issue. The paper discusses some other reasons why the selection of lottery winners and "losers" might not be perfectly random (starting with the fact that some players buy more tickets than others), but skimming section 5, it appears that they were handled with different methods, not LATE.
Press releases authored by PR staff (i.e. laypeople) are usually not considered to be the most reliable sources on scientific topics - especially if they might have been written in haste to react to a Nobel announcement within a few hours. But apparently User:Ktin was also drawing from the actual research paper when adding the corresponding text to this article (at least they cited it alongside the press release). Ktin, did you look at where and how the paper uses the LATE?
Regards, HaeB (talk) 12:09, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

I have now removed that claim (i.e. the 2001 Imbens/Rubin/Sacerdote paper being one of the real-world applications of the model) from the article.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:59, 30 September 2024 (UTC)