Quantitative Methods for Policy Research: Institute for Policy Research

Under its research program on Quantitative Methods, the Statistics for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice, or STEPP, Center seeks to serve the practitioners and policymakers by developing and promoting state-of-the-art methods for researchers, especially in education and the applied social sciences. It seeks to generate strong evidence on research designs, synthesize and interpret results of multiple studies, and translate findings to inform policy and practice. The STEPP Center was founded in 2019 and evolved from IPR’s Q-Center.

A Message From Larry Hedges, Program Chair and STEPP Co-Director

We launched the Q-Center at IPR in 2006 to take advantage of a critical mass of scholars at the forefront of evidence-based research on social policy issues. Today, we seek to build on our foundational work by launching the STEPP Center to further develop and assess methods to generate, synthesize, and translate evidence to improve policy and practice.

Working Papers

Recently published articles and working papers in this program area include:

Seema Jayachandran, Monica Biradavolu, and Jan Cooper. 2021. Using Machine Learning and Qualitative Interviews to Design a Five-Question Women's Agency Index (WP-21-23).

David de la Croix and Matthias Doepke. 2021. A Soul’s View of the Optimal Population Problem (WP-21-14).

Charles F. Manski, Alan Sanstad, and Stephen DeCanio. 2021. Addressing Partial Identification in Climate Modeling and Policy Analysis (WP-21-06).

All Papers

Faculty Experts

This collaborative group of interdisciplinary scholars stems from statistics, economics, education, political science, and other social science fields.