Estimation of the causal effect of a binary treatment on outcomes often requires conditioning on covariates to address selection on observed variables. This is not straightforward when one or more of the covariates are measured with error. Here, we present a new semi-parametric estimator that...

Currently there is little practical advice on which treatment effect estimator to use when trying to adjust for observable differences. A recent suggestion is to compare the performance of estimators in simulations that somehow mimic the empirical context. Two ways to run such 'empirical Monte...

Currently there is little practical advice on which treatment effect estimator to use when trying to adjust for observable differences. A recent suggestion is to compare the performance of estimators in simulations that somehow mimic the empirical context. Two ways to run such "empirical Monte...

Researchers in economics and other disciplines are often interested in the causal effect of a binary treatment on outcomes. Econometric methods used to estimate such effects are divided into one of two strands depending on whether they require the conditional independence assumption (i.e.,...

In the practice of program evaluation, choosing the covariates and the functional form of the propensity score is an important choice that the researchers make when estimating treatment effects. This paper proposes a data-driven way of averaging the estimators over the candidate specifications...

It is standard practice in applied work to rely on linear least squares regression to estimate the effect of a binary variable ("treatment") on some outcome of interest. In this paper I study the interpretation of the regression estimand when treatment effects are in fact heterogeneous. I show...

Average treatment effects estimands can present significant bias under the presence of outliers. Moreover, outliers can be particularly hard to detect, creating bias and inconsistency in the semi-parametric ATE estimads. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that...

Outliers can be particularly hard to detect, creating bias and inconsistency in the semi-parametric estimates. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that semi-parametric methods, such as matching, are biased in the presence of outliers. Bad and good leverage point outliers...