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Julian Gerez

@juliangerez.com
1.1K followers 626 following 81 posts

Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Political Science (by courtesy) at the University of California, Irvine. I study the political economy of security, crime, and law enforcement.

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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 08/09/2026
You could imagine something similar in soccer, where you assess finishing ability by simulating counterfactual decisions a player could make when they're through on goal and comparing that to the decision ultimately taken.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 08/09/2026
This is great! I think the use of counterfactuals ("ghosts") is a really underexplored avenue innovation in sports analytics, and I'm glad to see it in action.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 09/07/2026
No question about it
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IE Political Science Department @iepolisci.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
We are hiring! We have 3 tenure track positions open: - Comparative Politics: apply.interfolio.com/188149 - International Relations: apply.interfolio.com/188150 - Political Economy: apply.interfolio.com/188151 All jobs have deadlines Oct 5th. Please help spread the word to potential candidates.
apply.interfolio.com
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 15/06/2026
Thinking about it more you might want to combine it with the area of the triangle but this could actually be weirdly predictive. I don't know what this tells us, but I refuse to believe it says nothing.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 15/06/2026
New advanced metric just dropped: take a team's first three shots and connect them to form a triangle. What is the average largest angle across all matches? Analytics has gone too long without asking this question, it's time for answers!
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 11/06/2026
Political science: The probability of being the decisive voter is effectively zero Second round of the 2026 Peruvian general election:
Election results graphic showing Keiko Fujimori (FP) vs. Roberto Sánchez (JP) in the 2026 Peruvian presidential runoff, 98.2% reporting as of June 10, 23:48 UTC−5. Popular vote: Fujimori 9,032,651 (50.002%) — Sánchez 9,032,000 (49.998%).
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 04/06/2026
I was happy to present this at a work-in-progress workshop at @ucipopcenter.bsky.social, and the @ucisocialecology.bsky.social kindly wrote it up: socialecology.uci.edu/news/rigorou...
socialecology.uci.edu
Rigorous scrutiny | School of Social Ecology
Lively debate shapes future of Julian Gerez’s California tobacco tax compliance study
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 04/06/2026
Sharing ongoing work with @simonepaci.bsky.social: why is "vice" tax evasion stubbornly high? We argue the usual compliance mechanisms fail for vice taxes, and are currently running (we think) the first RCT of excise enforcement with the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration to test.
Map of California titled "Wave 1 Tobacco Inspections." Subtitle: 539 inspections across 10 CDTFA zones, February–March 2026. Blue dots mark inspected retailers, orange triangles mark zone headquarters, and orange dashed circles show 30-mile sampling radii around each headquarters. Clusters of inspections are visible along the coast and Central Valley, spanning zones from West Sacramento and Oakland in the north to San Diego and Irvine in the south.Horizontal bar chart titled "Seizure Rates by Zone, Wave 1." Subtitle: 125 seizures detected across 539 inspections (23%). Bars show seizure rates ranging from 15% (Bakersfield, 11/75) to 36% (Fresno, 16/45), with all 10 California zones represented. Fresno and San Jose have the highest rates; West Sacramento and Bakersfield the lowest.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 06/05/2026
Back in NYC I used to live in Bergen Street. I love California a lot so far but deeply miss pedestrian-, bike-, and transit-oriented development.
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Filipe Campante @filipecampante.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
Look, every single “deal” reached by a university with the Trump administration is a moral stain that will be seen with deep embarrassment once we’re through this. But for Northwestern to do this now, when the administration is visibly weakened, is even more shameful and inexcusable.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 17/11/2025
Causation does not imply variation www.grumpy-economist.com/p/causation-...
grumpy-economist.com
Causation Does not Imply Variation
Tyler Muir suggested this lovely catchphrase, which should stand next to “Correlation does not imply causation” in our menagerie of econometric sayings.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 07/11/2025
:-(
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 05/11/2025
These are great—it would be cool to facet the plots so that they share the same y-axis, because I think these are even understating the shift (subject to turnout differences and ecological inference, etc.)!
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eraldo.bsky.social @eraldo.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
Next Monday! @ucisocialecology.bsky.social
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 01/11/2025
And conditioning on those other characteristics isn't necessarily helpful (hence the DAG point), because many of those variables lie downstream of moderation in the causal process...
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 01/11/2025
Put differently, none of this evidence can tell you what would happen if you could flip a switch and make a candidate moderate, all else equal. It only tells you the difference between candidates who are moderate—along with all other characteristics that come bundled with that—and those who are not.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 01/11/2025
To expand on this, my view on this debate is that part of the issue is that the Nate Silver-types misunderstand causality. Even if the moderate advantage is X number of percentage points that doesn't imply that *moderation* will be successful. These are all just conditional correlations (at best).
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 01/11/2025
Even a very low p-value only indicates that, if the null hypothesis were true, observing a test statistic that large would be unlikely. It does not, on its own, establish causality. Causal inference depends on credible research design and identifying assumptions, not statistical significance.
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Erin Lockwood @erinkaylockwood.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Nearly half of UC undergraduates and graduate students experience food insecurity. Those numbers will increase with the federal government's refusal to fund SNAP (CalFresh). If you can afford it, please consider contributing to the UCI Basic Needs Center, which feeds many of our students.
zotfunder.give.uci.edu
Fill Our Pantries: Nourish Student Success
Help University of California, Irvine raise $15,000 for the project: Fill Our Pantries: Nourish Student Success. Your gift will make a difference!
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Adee Weller @adeeweller.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Re-election means voters can hold elected officials accountable, but can it be effective where criminal groups shape local politics? In my new article in @bjpols.bsky.social, I show that in high-crime areas of Mexico, re-election did not boost accountability, but increased collusion instead.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 25/10/2025
This is a great opportunity at an amazing university in one of the most beautiful cities in the world!
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 25/10/2025
Genial Sergi! Lo compartiré con mis redes.
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Sergi Martínez @sergisme.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
📢 Exciting news from EAFIT University in Medellín 🇨🇴! The Politics and Development Area of the School of Finance, Economics, and Government is opening 3️⃣ tenure-track positions to join our interdisciplinary School. 👇 More details in the next posts.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 24/10/2025
Fun exercise for students in a causal inference class: draw a DAG for this debate.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 22/10/2025
This is great! I've always wanted to do this but never had the time—and am grateful you did so at the shot level. Can you provide some descriptives on the variance parameters? That was always my big curiosity from this type of approach. www.juliangerez.com/blog/2025/02...
juliangerez.com
Utilizing variance in xG to understand finishing ability: a concept
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 22/10/2025
(2/2)
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 22/10/2025
I joined @cnn.com International last night to discuss the recent U.S. military strikes on alleged drug-smuggling vessels and their implications for counternarcotics cooperation, U.S.-Colombia relations, and regional geopolitics more broadly. (1/2)
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Philip Luke Johnson @phillegitimate.bsky.social · 20/09/2025
I wrote about deadly US strikes in the Caribbean. A lot has been said about the illegality of the strikes, but impunity (and not legality) is the whole point.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 17/09/2025
I'm a true believer and I checked out the book from the library... but I will order a copy to have on my shelf and help proselytize!
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Journal of Peace Research @jpeaceresearch.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
🚨 New publication alert! 🚨 When do armed groups capture democratic elections, and when do they fail to do so? In a new study, @andresuribe.bsky.social (@uwmadison.bsky.social) investigates how local party competition can shape the effectiveness of coercion during Colombia’s 2002 Senate elections.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 14/08/2025
Do you think this would be an issue if he played a different position?
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 05/08/2025
I'm working on a difference-in-RDs project but struggling with how to properly handle bandwidth selection across treatment periods. It's not obvious to me how to choose a bandwidth for multiple separate RD estimates at once. Would love pointers to resources or best practices! Thanks in advance 🙏🏼
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 04/08/2025
Congratulations Ana Paula, fantastic!
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 02/08/2025
Indeed. And Columbia has made it harder for everyone else by demonstrating that the federal government's coercive strategy works. They've narrowed the space for other institutions to resist this type of extortion.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 28/07/2025
By the way, this also applies to all experiments and any observational studies that use comparisons. Report control/baseline information to contextualize differences!
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 28/07/2025
Great explainer! I think visualization plays a role too—both FOX/WSJ present party differences centered at zero, without the levels for each party. Here's a quick (thrown-together) example of how showing the underlying values—even when excluding the other responses—paints a very different picture.
A faceted bar plot that shows FOX News and WSJ poll results on which party is best prepared to handle two issues, inflation and the economy. The FOX News poll results show the two parties basically even, with both parties having relatively high levels of support. The WSJ poll on the other hand shows much lower absolute support for both parties, suggesting widespread voter skepticism about either party's ability to handle these issues, even as Republicans have a lead.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 24/07/2025
It's hard to describe how sad and embarrassed I feel by this.
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Arin Dube @arindube.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
A timely and trenchant piece by Suresh Naidu. When future generations sift through the wreckage of our era, they’ll find it strewn with the institutional and personal failures of leaders both great and small. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Columbia’s Administrators Are Fooling Themselves
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 23/07/2025
Thanks for sharing. Can you link the paper?
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 07/05/2025
Gracias por todo, Vicky!
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 07/05/2025
I defended my dissertation today! A heartfelt thanks to my committee—@vickymurillo.bsky.social, John Marshall, Sarah Daly, @emoncada.bsky.social, and @gemmadipoppa.bsky.social—for their insight, generosity, and steady support, as well as the family and friends who've backed me every step of the way.
Me in the center with the members of my committee, smiling in front of a whiteboard after my dissertation defense!
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 05/03/2025
Building on this and the discussion of political strategists, a key issue is that while strategists excel at maximizing short-term, easily measurable outcomes (e.g., which email subject line generates more donations), they are less adept at addressing these broader, more interesting questions.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 03/03/2025
See Elisa Wirsching's great research on the uneven variation in NYPD effort for political reasons for some evidence on this. elisawirsching.github.io/research/pol... bsky.app/profile/drew...
elisawirsching.github.io
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 04/02/2025
I'm neither happy nor proud of this joke, but I appreciate the support
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 04/02/2025
Wow, another unreasonably high expectation for instrumental variables papers—not only must the exclusion restriction hold for identification, but for funding too?
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 03/02/2025
To end on a lighter note, a less serious (but equally true!) version of my thoughts on government funding of science: bsky.app/profile/laur...
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 03/02/2025
These cuts will have ripple effects beyond what we can predict. Beyond the scientific and policy implications, they are not legal! Congress established USAID, and shutting it down via executive action is unconstitutional. The consequences of these decisions will be felt for years to come.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 03/02/2025
USAID funds many proven interventions but also supports long-term efforts that don't always show instant results. E.g., cutting funding for epidemic response in Africa increases the likelihood of global outbreaks, defunding civil society assistance in Latin America fuels migration pressures, etc.
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Julian Gerez @juliangerez.com · 03/02/2025
But fear of failure distorts how research is pursued and creates blindspots in our knowledge. When funding is tied to short-term impact, researchers avoid riskier projects that could lead to groundbreaking discoveries. This is true not just for science but for global development work as well.
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