This paper demonstrates how a natural experiment in education can be used to estimate causal effects. The Swedish compulsory school reform extended basic education gradually across cohorts and municipalities, allowing for a difference-in-differences analysis. The paper summarizes the literature...

This paper evaluates the diffusion of peer effects on academic achievement of 4th grade students in the Brazilian public school system. Using data from Prova Brasil 2013, the identification strategy builds on the use of an IV approach, in which the instruments for peers' performance are the...

Estimators that exploit an instrumental variable to correct for misclassification in a binary regressor typically assume that the misclassification rates are invariant across all values of the instrument. We show that this assumption is invalid in routine empirical settings. We derive a new...

This paper studies robust and optimal estimation of the slope coefficients in a partially linear instrumental variables model with nonparametric partial identification. We establish the root-n asymptotic normality of a penalized sieve minimum distance estimator of the slope coefficients. We show...

Access to reliable energy is central to improvements in living standards and is a Sustainable Development Goal. This study moves beyond counting the electrified households and examines the effect of the hours of electricity households receives on their welfare. We hypothesize that additional...

Many economic studies use shift-share instruments to estimate causal effects. Often, all shares need to fulfill an exclusion restriction, making the identifying assumption strict. This paper proposes to use methods that relax the exclusion restriction by selecting invalid shares. I apply the...

A central challenge in estimating the causal effect of TV advertising on demand is isolating quasi-random variation in advertising. Political advertising, which topped $14 billion in expenditures in 2016, has been proposed as a plausible source of such variation and thus a candidate for an...

While the elasticity of housing supply has served as a popular instrument for inferring the causal effect of housing price growth on economic outcomes, concerns about the exclusion restriction have emerged. We introduce a methodology for creating instruments using the pre-existing supply of...

Using unique data on investor views of EDGAR company filings, we document that many investors devote significant effort towards governance research. However, investors' monitoring is focused disproportionately on large firms and firms with meetings outside the busy spring proxy season. Using an...