Capital structure theories are often formulated as causal narratives to explain which factors drive financing choices. These narratives are usually examined by estimating cross-sectional relations between leverage and its determinants. However, the limitations of causal inference from...

We formulate a measure of information efficiency in a general, no-arbitrage semimartingale model of the price process. The market quality measure is applied to a high-frequency dataset from the interdealer FX market to identify changes in market efficiency after a decimalization of tick size.

We introduce a class of interpretable tree-based models (P-Tree) for analyzing (unbalanced) panel data, with iterative and global (instead of recursive and local) split criteria. We apply P-Tree to split the cross section of asset returns under the no-arbitrage condition, generating a stochastic...

This paper examines the econometric causal model for policy analysis developed by the seminal ideas of Ragnar Frisch and Trygve Haavelmo. We compare the econometric causal model with two popular causal frameworks: Neyman-Holland causal model and the do-calculus. The Neyman-Holland causal model...

In the home-care services industry, caregivers drive to visit patients scattered in a district and deliver various care services at the patient's home. We use a unique data set, with a standard panel structure, recording the hours of service and the exact number of miles traveled by each...

The identification of bias in election results due to partisan gerrymandering and redistricting manipulation is important to preserve functioning democracy. Many methods have been proposed but none have been proven superior. After an overview of existing methods, the paper looks at the...

Economists and social scientists have debated the relative importance of nature (one’s genes) and nurture (one’s environment) for decades, if not centuries. This debate can now be informed by the ready availability of genetic data in a growing number of social science datasets. This paper...