this is a clear set of claims, which is terrific. when you overturn
someone else's results, as you're claiming, be sure to explain why that
person would have been led to believe what they believed (i.e., assuming
they know what they're doing but say didn't have access to the data or
methods you do). also, explain what is it about your better methods that
led to new results. i.e., don't treat them as black boxes; e.g., if it
was imputation that led you to not losing data that they listwise deleted
away, see if you can do a little side analysis and determine what was it
about the then-missing observations that was different and the original
author missed.
Gary
On Tue, 1 May 2007, Jill Goldenziel wrote:
Improving Predictions of Civil Wars: Inequality
Matters
Jill Goldenziel and Sana Nourani
Collier and Hoeffler's seminal article "Greed and Grievance in Civil War"
(2004) posits the so-called "greed explanation" for civil war: variables
tied to opportunity costs
for attacking the government are significantly correlated with civil war
occurrence. On the other hand, "grievance" variables such as income
inequality and ethnic fractionalization are uncorrelated with civil wars. We
replicate the author's findings and offer an improved model for civil war
prediction by using multiple imputation, controlling for rare events, and
adding alternative measures of ethnic fractionalization. We find that
increased social inequality and its interaction with measures of ethnic
stratification have a significant effect on the probability of civil war.
Conversely, a number of "greed" variables identified by Collier and Hoeffler
no longer have explanatory power.