This paper estimates Local Average Treatment Effects (LATEs) of neighborhood quality from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility experiment in a generalized model with multiple treatment levels. We propose a new approach to identifying parameters that exploits the identification of...

Trying to learn about neighborhood effects from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility experiment by focusing on its program effects obfuscates the evidence on neighborhood effects from MTO. This paper shows that using Intent-to-Treat (ITT) and Treatment-on-the-Treated (TOT) program...

This paper investigates the assumptions under which various parameters can be identified by the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing mobility experiment. Joint models of potential outcomes and selection into treatment are used to clarify the current interpretation of empirical evidence,...

This paper uses an overlapping-generations dynamic general equilibrium model of residential sorting and intergenerational human capital accumulation to investigate effects of neighborhood externalities. In the model, households choose where to live and how much to invest toward the production of...

A wide literature uses date of birth as an instrument to study the causal effects of educational attainment. This paper shows how parents delaying their children’s initial enrollment in kindergarten, a practice known as redshirting, can make estimates obtained through this identification...

This paper is concerned with understanding how causal effects can be identified in past data and then used to predict the future in light of the problem of context, or the fact that treatment always influences the outcome variable in combination with covariates. Structuralist and experimentalist...

Black males in the United States are exposed to tremendous violence at young ages: In the NLSY97 26 percent report seeing someone shot by age 12, and 43 percent by age 18. This paper studies how this exposure to violence and its associated social isolation affect education and labor market...

This paper studies causal effects informative for deciding the age when children should start kindergarten. I present evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 (ECLS-K) that standard instrumental variable strategies do not identify effects of delaying...

Structural Causal Models define causal effects in terms of a single Data Generating Process (DGP), and the Rubin Causal Model defines causal effects in terms of a model that can represent counterfactuals from many DGPs. Under these different definitions, notationally similar causal effects make...

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment randomly assigned housing vouchers that could be used in low-poverty neighborhoods. Consistent with the literature, I find that receiving an MTO voucher had no effect on outcomes like earnings, employment, and test scores. However, after studying the...