Structural econometric methods are often criticized for being sensitive to functional form assumptions. We study parametric estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE) derived from a widely used class of latent threshold crossing models and show they yield LATE estimates...

This paper studies approximate policy iteration (API) methods which use least-squares Bellman error minimization for policy evaluation. We address several of its enhancements, namely, Bellman error minimization with instrumental variables, projected Bellman error minimization, and projected...

The empirical literature on program evaluation limits its scope almost exclusively to models where treatment effects are homogenous for observationally identical individuals. This paper considers a treatment effect model in which treatment effects may be heterogeneous, even among observationally...

This paper considers tests and confidence sets (CS's) concerning the coefficient on the endogenous variable in the linear IV regression model with homoskedastic normal errors and one right-hand side endogenous variable. The paper derives a finite-sample lower bound function for the probability...

This paper shows that import exposure affects voting behavior because it affects local labor markets. We develop a new framework for mediation analysis where one instrumental variable is sufficient to identify three causal effects. Using German data from 1987–2009, we find that import exposure...

This paper studies the identifying power of an instrumental variable in the nonparametric heterogeneous treatment effect framework when a binary treatment is mismeasured and endogenous. Using a binary instrumental variable, I characterize the sharp identified set for the local average treatment...

This chapter presents key concepts and theoretical results for analyzing estimation and inference in high-dimensional models. High-dimensional models are characterized by having a number of unknown parameters that is not vanishingly small relative to the sample size. We first present results in...

We shed new light on the determinants of growth by tackling the blunt and weak instrument problems in the empirical growth literature. As an instrument for each endogenous variable, we propose average values of the same variable in neighboring countries. This method has the advantage of...