Congratulations to Professor Ted Enamorado for winning this PolMeth award!
The Statistical Software Award Committee is pleased to announce fastLink by Ted Enamorado (WUSTL), Kosuke Imai (Harvard), and Ben Fifield (ACLU Legal Analytics Group) as the winner of the 2021 Society for Political Methodology Statistical Software Award. fastLink solves a common problem faced by researchers in political science as well as across the social sciences: merging multiple datasets that do not share unique record identifiers. This problem arises when linking data between surveys and administrative data, among multiple survey rounds, when connecting historical to modern administrative units, and in many other situations. Most applied work relies on manual or ad hoc merging of non-exact matches or deterministic algorithms, none of which can be used to quantify the amount of error in the merge.
