Visiting Scholar: Kosuke Imai

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Visiting Scholar: Kosuke Imai

WashU Department of Political Science will host Harvard political scientist, Kosuke Imai, for a discussion surrounding his research titled, "Estimating Racial and Ethnic Disparities When Group Membership Is Unavailable." More information on Imai's work can be found on his website linked above.

The talk will take place in Seigle Hall 301 at 1pm. Light refreshments will be provided.

Abstract for Kosuke Imai's talk:

Estimating racial and ethnic disparities plays an essential role in research on discrimination, representation, and inequality. However, individual group membership is often unavailable, leading researchers to infer race and ethnicity from names and geographic location. Existing methods typically rely on name-race frequency tables, which are available only for common names, coarse racial categories, and a small number of countries. Moreover, even accurate predictions of group membership do not necessarily yield valid estimates of disparities.
 

We develop a methodological framework that addresses both challenges. First, we propose list-powered Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (L-BISG), which derives calibrated group probabilities from group-specific name lists, including those generated synthetically by large language models (LLMs). Because these lists may contain unknown biases, we represent names using embeddings and apply a statistical correction based on proximal inference. Second, we propose Bayesian Instrumental Regression for Disparity Estimation (BIRDiE), which uses these probabilities to estimate disparities under an identification assumption that is often more credible than those underlying standard approaches. Across U.S. voter files, the full-count 1900 U.S. Census, and the Lebanese voter registry, we find that our framework, using LLM-generated name lists, produces accurate and well-calibrated group probabilities as well as precise disparity estimates comparable to those obtained by methods requiring name–race data.