home department
- Statistics Academic Department
- Contact Info
- 202-994-6548
Joseph L Gastwirth Faculty Member
Positions
- Professor of Statistics and Economics, Columbian College of Arts and Sciences , The George Washington University 1972 -
During my career I have worked in a number of areas of statistical theory and methodology and its applications in a number of areas.. Currently, my focus has been on measuring economic inequality, wage and health disparities,and developing statistical procedures for detecting discrimination by employers in their pay and promotion practices and by prosecutors when they make peremptory challenges at trial. I am also interested in statistical issues arising in other areas of law, e.g. international trade and product liability.
Research Areas
- Estimating statistical parameters and measures from grouped data in order to preserve privacy and confidentiality
- Measures of economic inequality and their statistical properties
- Robust statistical methods and non-parametric statistics
- Statistical methods useful in both biostatistical and legal applications
- The use of statistical evidence in legal cases
-
Affiliation
-
Publications
selected publications
-
academic article
- Graphical Measures Summarizing the Inequality in Income of Two Groups. Statistics and Public Policy. 2021
- The Changing Face of Wealth Inequality in the USA. Significance. 2021
- Statistical issues arising in the Office of Federal Contract Compliance’s recent notice on nondiscrimination obligations of contractors and the comments submitted by the Chamber of Commerce.. Law,Probability and Risk. 2020
- On the capacity of the Gini index to represent income distributions. METRON. 2020
- . Statistical procedures for assessing the need for an affirmative action plan: A Reanalysis of Shea v Kerry. Statistics and Public Policy,. 2020
- Large sample properties of a new measure of income inequality. Statitics and Probabiliyy Letters. 2019
- Case comment: estimating the economic value of the loss of a chance: a re-examination of Chaplin v. Hicks. Law, Probability and Risk. 2018
- Grouping methods for estimating the prevalence of rare traits from complex survey data that preserve confidentiality of respondents. Statistics in Medicine,. 2018
- Evaluating the accuracy of small p-values in genetic association studies using Edgeworth expansions. Scandinavian Journal of Statistics. 2018
- The Potential Usefulness of Bross’s Principles of Statistical Criticism for the Evaluation of Statistical Evidence in Law and Public Policy. Observational Studies. 2018
- Is the Gini index of inequality overly sensitive to changes in the middle of the distribution?. Statistics and Public Policy. 2017
- Some recurrent problems in interpreting statistical evidence in equal employment cases. Law, Probability and Risk. 2017
- Statistical issues in Kerner v. Denver: A class action disparate impact case.. Law, Probability and Risk. 2017
- Measures of Economic Inequality Focusing on the Status of the Lower and Middle Income Groups.. Statistics and Public Policy. 2016
- Statistical Issues Arising in Class Action Cases: A Reanalysis of the Statistical Evidence in Dukes v. Wal-Mart II.. L. 2016
- Genetic Risks and Genetic Model Specification.. Theoretical Biology. 2016
- Statistical Testing of Peremptory Challenge Data for Possible Discrimination: Application to Foster v. Chatman. Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc. 2016
- The Importance of group means for estimating the Lorenz Curve and Gini Index from grouped data. The American Statistician. 2016
- Statistical measures for evaluating protected group under-representation: Analysis of the conflicting inferences drawn from the same data in People v. Bryant and Ambrose v. Booker. Law, Probability and Risk. 2015
- Outlier reset CUSUM for the exploration of copy number alteration data.. Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology. 2015
- Analysis of genetic association studies incorporating prior information of genetic models. Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics. 2015
- Extension of the Peters-Belson method to estimate health disparities among multiple groups using logistic regression with survey data. Statistics in Medicine. 2015
- Did the Michigan Supreme Court Appreciate the Implications of Adopting the “Disparity of the Risk” Measure of Minority Representation in Jury Pools in People v. Brya. Statistics and Public Policy. 2014
- Median-based measures of inequality: Reassessing the increase in income inequality in the U.S. and Sweden. Statistical Journal of the IAOS. 2014
- New statistical tests for detecting disparate impact arising from two-stage selection processes.. The American Statistician. 2014
- Adaptive procedures for nested processes: application to equal employment.. Statistics and Its Interface. 2014
- Cox proportional hazards models with frailty for negatively correlated employment processes. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. 2014
- Should law and public policy adopt ‘practical causality’ as the appropriate criteria for deciding product liability cases and public policy?. Law, Probability and Risk. 2013
- The need to carefully interpret the statistics reporting the accuracy of a narcotics detection dog: Application to South Dakota v. Nguyen, State of Florida v. Harris and similar cases.. Jurimetrics. 2013
- Estimating restricted mean job tenures in semi-competing risk data compensating victims of discrimination. Annals of Applied Statistics. 2013
- Case comment: Appropriate Statistical Methodology Yields Stronger Evidence of Discriminatory Peremptory Challenges in North Carolina: Application to the Randolph County Data in North Carolina v. Rouse and related cases. Law, Probability and Risk. 2013
- Properties of statistical tests appropriate for the analysis of data in disparate impact cases. Law, Probability and Risk. 2013
- The Appropriateness of Survival Analysis for Determining Lost Pay in Discrimination Cases when the number of plaintiffs exceeds the number of job openings: Application of the “Lost Chance” Doctrine to Alexander v. Milwaukee. Law, Probability and Risk. 2013
- Statistical considerations support the Supreme Court’s decision in Matrixx Initiatives v. Siracusano. Jurimetrics. 2012
- The Need for Courts and Policy Makers to Carefully Evaluate Criticisms of Statistical Evidence. Revista i-lex. 2012
-
book
- Statistical Science in the Courtroom. None. 2000
- Statistical Reasoning in Law and Public Policy. Academic Press: Orlando, Fla. 1988
-
chapter
- How the legal system’s failure to appreciate statistical evidence disadvantages plaintiffs in discrimination cases.. Leadership and Diversity in Statistics and Data Science: Planning for Inclusive Excellence. 2021
- The role of statistical evidence in civil cases. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application. 2020
- A new non-parametric test of symmetry. Random Walk, Sequential Analysis and Related Topics – A Festschrift in Honor of Yuan-Shih Chow. 2006
- A Goodness-of-Fit Test for a Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve from Continuous Diagnostic Test Data. Crossing Boundaries: Statistical Essays in Honor of Jack Hall. 2003
- Law and Environmental Statistics. Encyclopedia of Environmetrics. 2002
- Screening and Selection. International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. 2001
- Runs Tests for Symmetry Update. Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences. 1999
- Cornfield's Inequality. Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. 1998
- Epidemiology as Legal Evidence. Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. 1998
- Medico-Legal Cases and Statistics. Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. 1998
- Efficiency Robust Rank Tests for the Location-Scale Problem. Nonparametric Statistics and Related Topics. 1992
- Measures of Uniformity. Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences.
- Pyramid Scheme Models. Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences.
- Scores. Encyclopedia of Biostatistics.
- Updated versions of the entries on Epidemiology as Legal Evidence and Cornfield’s Inequality appear. Encyclopedia of Biostatistics.
-
conference paper
- New Measures of Inequality Show that Income and Wealth Inequality in the United States Grew Faster than the Gini Index used by most government agencies 2018
- Some recurrent problems in interpreting statistical evidence in equal employment cases 2017
- New Measures of Income Inequality 2017
- A Robust Gini type-index better detects shifts in the income distribution: A Reanalysis of income inequality in the United States from 1967-2012 2013
- A New Statistical Test for Adverse Event Data: Application to Siracusano vs. Matrixx Iniiatives Inc.: 2013
- Noether Award Lecture: Robust Statistical Mehods 2012
- Obtaining robust TDT-type candidate-gene association tests for a family of genetic models 2002
- The Most Informative Ordered Data for the Scale Parameter of Symmetric Distributions with Application to BLUEs 2002
- Evaluating the Accuracy of Art Auction Pre-sale Predictions: How well do Selection Models Perform? 2001
- Pooled Sample Screening with Quality Control. 2001
- Statistical Measures of Economic Discrimination Useful in Evaluating Fairness 1996
- Evaluating Re-interview Survey Methods for Measuring Response Errors 1993
- Statistical Analyses From Summary Data and Their Impact on the Issue of Confidentiality. 1979
- A New Index of Income Inequality 1974
- Measurement of Earnings Differentials Between the Sexes. 1974
- A New Goodness of Fit Test 1973
-
review
- A Murky Business. Significance. 2015
presentations
-
presentation
- Statistical Issues arising in equal employment cases, Joing Statistical Meetings 2019
- Invited panelist, Conference on Women in Statistics and Data Science 2018
- New Measures of Inequality Show that Income Inequality in the United States, Canada and the UK Grew Faster than the Gini Index used by most government agencies, Joint Statistical Meetings 2018
-
-
Teaching
teaching activities
-
Service
reviewer of
- Biometrical Journal (Journal)
- Columbia Statistical review (Journal)
- External Evaluator of a candidate for promotion to Full Professor at Wharton School, Univ. Of Pennsylvania (Journal)
- Journal of American Statistical Association (Journal)
- Journal of the American Statistical Association (Journal)
- Law, Probability and Risk (Journal)
- Law, Probability and Risk (Journal)
- Metron (Journal)
- National Science Foundation (Journal)
- Statistics and Public Policy (Journal)
- Statistics in Medicine (Journal)
- The American Statistician (Journal)
professional service activities
- missing activity President 1982 -
- International Statistical Institute Other 1980 -
- American Association for the Advancement of Science Other 1970 -
- Institute of Mathematical Statistics Member 1963 -
- Biometric Society Other
- Industrial Relations Research Association Other
- International Chinese Statistical Association Other
- International Genetic Epidemiology Society Other
- International Society for Bayesian Analysis Other
- Phi Beta Kappa Other
- Royal Statistical Society Other
- Sigma Xi Other
- American Staistical Association Member 2015 - 2199
- missing activity President 1983
-
Background
education and training
- Ph.D degree in Mathematical Statistics 1963
- M.A degree in Mathematics, Princeton University 1960
- B.S degree in Mathematics, Yale University 1958
awards and honors
- Karl Peace Award for Statistical Contributions to the Betterment of Society, conferred by AmericanStatistical, 2019
- American Statistical Association’s Noether Award, conferred by None, 2012
- American Statistical Association’s Award for Best Applications Paper, conferred by Application of Change-Point Methods the analysis of data in equal employment cases, 2002
- Shiskin Award for Economic Statistics, conferred by None, 1998
- John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, conferred by None, 1985
- Who's Who in Economics, conferred by None, 1985
- Fellowship in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, conferred by None, 1972
- Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conferred by None, 1971
- Fellowship in the American Statistical Association, conferred by None, 1970
- Washington Statistical Society Award, conferred by None, 1969
- Who's Who in America, conferred by None
-
Contact
full name
- Joseph L Gastwirth
mailing address
-
Department of Statistics, Rome Hall (747)
801 I Street NW
George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
USA
GW Expert Finder utilizes up to four primary sources that shares data to populate individual profiles. Reference these FAQs for information on how to update your GW expert profile.
GW Expert Finder utilizes up to four primary sources that shares data to populate individual profiles. Reference these FAQs for information on how to update your GW expert profile.
