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 estimates...

A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging either many exogenous shifts or exogenous shares. We present the core logic of both paths and practical takeaways via simple checklists. A variety of empirical settings illustrate...

Many studies in economics use instruments or treatments which combine a set of exogenous shocks with other predetermined variables by a known formula. Examples include shift-share instruments and measures of social or spatial spillovers. We review recent econometric tools for this setting, which...

We develop new tools for causal inference in settings where exogenous shocks affect the treatment status of multiple observations jointly, to different extents. In these settings researchers may construct treatments or instruments that combine the shocks with predetermined measures of shock...

Credit reports are used in nearly all consumer lending decisions and, increasingly, in hiring decisions in the labor market, but the impact of a bad credit report is largely unknown. We study the effects of credit reports on financial and labor market outcomes using a difference-in-differences...

We estimate the causal effects of parental incarceration on children's short- and long-run out-comes using administrative data from Sweden. Our empirical strategy exploits exogenous varia-tion in parental incarceration from the random assignment of criminal defendants to judges with different...