Fırat Bilgel

Causal inference is the ultimate objective of many experimental and observational studies. How the judicial behavior of a judge with children would have changed in a child abuse trial had the judge had no children? Do health parity laws reduce suicides? How well judge behavior could be predicted by machine learning in jail-or-bail decisions? Does private gun ownership deter or facilitate crime? Answering these types of questions is a challenging task because the researcher must infer the counterfactual (what would have happened) from observed data (what actually happened). In such settings, the imputation of the missing counterfactual or potential outcome is complicated by the fact that the assignment to treatment is not random; that is, subjects self-select into treatment. The fundamental issue that motivates my research is the identification of the causal effect of a particular intervention/event and the underlying causal mechanisms using purely observational data.

Causal inference methods have become a significant part of my research, intertwined with Law & Economics, Health Economics and Political Economy. As a spillover effect of my longstanding co-authorship, I have also been involved with Regional Science and Spatial Analysis. At the intersection of Law & Economics and Health, I worked in an attempt to identify the effects of various legislative and regulatory interventions in transplant medicine on defaults, regulations, and selective organ donation incentives. The interdisciplinary nature of my research on donation and transplantation allowed me to reach a broader audience, including medical doctors, legal scholars, bioethicists and legislators.

Between 2015 and 2019, I received external funding for four projects on political economy, development economics and health and economic geography, funded by the Economic Research Forum (ERF); a regional network dedicated to promote high-quality research in the Middle East and North Africa. I spent the 2017-2018 academic year at Montana State University as a research scholar, with the Initiative for Regulation and Applied Economic Analysis. During this period, I worked on gun control, gun ownership, their effects on organ donation from victims of homicide and inequalities in end-stage renal disease in the United States. As with many scholars, my research agenda was taken over by the Covid-19 pandemic. I have written three Covid-19 papers on the impact of human capital on workplace mobility, the effects of lockdowns on social distancing and of vaccination on Covid-19 burden in Turkey. I have a good command of causal graph analysis (directed acyclic graphs and do-calculus), synthetic control, regression discontinuity design and applied spatial analysis.