Lottery estimates suggest oversubscribed urban charter schools boost student achievement markedly. But these estimates needn’t capture treatment effects for students who haven’t applied to charter schools or for students attending charters for which demand is weak. This paper reports...

This paper presents an econometric mediation analysis. It considers identification of production functions and the sources of output effects (treatment effects) from experimental interventions when some inputs are mismeasured and others are entirely omitted.

We examine heterogeneity in the impacts of exposure to mixed-ability ‘comprehensive’ schools in adolescence on long-term health and smoking behaviour. We explore the roles that cognitive and non-cognitive skills may play in moderating these impacts. We use data from the 1958 National Child...

We present a methodology for estimating the distributional effects of an endogenous treatment that varies at the group level when there are group-level unobservables, a quantile extension of Hausman and Taylor (1981). Because of the presence of group-level unobservables, standard quantile...

We evaluate the effect of a politician’s age on political governance, reelection rates,and policies using data on Italian local governments. Our results suggest that younger politicians are more likely to behave strategically in response to election incentives: they increase spending and...

This paper provides a systematic analysis of identification in linear social interactions models. This is both a theoretical and an econometric exercise as the analysis is linked to a rigorously delineated model of interdependent decisions. We develop an incomplete information game that...

We consider the estimation of a semiparametric location-scale model subject to endogenous selection, in the absence of an instrument or a large support regressor. Identification relies on the independence between the covariates and selection, for arbitrarily large values of the outcome. In this...

Researchers and policy makers are often interested in estimating how treatments or policy interventions affect the outcomes of those most in need of help. This concern has motivated the increasingly common practice of disaggregating experimental data by groups constructed on the basis of an...

This paper provides empirical evidence of an established theoretical result: in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects, OLS is generally not a consistent estimator of the sample-weighted average treatment effect (SWE). We propose two alternative estimators that do recover the SWE in the...

The 2005 split-share reform in China mandated the conversion of nontradable stocks into tradable status. This paper examines the effects of stock markets on corporate outcomes exploiting multiple institutional features of the Chinese conversion program. Using a generalized propensity score...