For treatment effects—one of the core issues in modern econometric analysis—prediction and estimation are two sides of the same coin. As it turns out, machine learning methods are the tool for generalized prediction models. Combined with econometric theory, they allow us to estimate not only...

An important goal when analyzing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome is to understand the mechanisms through which the treatment causally works. We define a causal mechanism effect of a treatment and the causal effect net of that mechanism using the potential outcomes framework. These...

We consider policy evaluations when SUTVA is violated because of the presence of interference among units. We propose to explicitly model interactions as a function of units characteristics. Our approach is applied to the evaluation of a policy implemented in Tuscany (a region in Italy) on small...

In many empirical problems, the evaluation of treatment effects is complicated by sample selection such that the outcome is only observed for a non-random subpopulation. In the absence of instruments and/or tight parametric assumptions, treatment effects are not point identified, but can be...

This survey gives a brief overview of the literature on the difference-in-difference (DiD) estimation strategy and discusses major issues using a treatment effect perspective. In this sense, this survey gives a somewhat different view on DiD than the standard textbook discussion of the...

This survey gives a brief overview of the literature on the difference-in-difference (DiD) estimation strategy and discusses major issues using a treatment effects perspective. In this sense, this survey gives a somewhat different view on DiD than the standard textbook discussion of the DiD...

This paper examines the application of quasi-experimental methods in environmental economics. We begin with two observations: (i) standard quasi-experimental methods, first applied in other microeconomic fields, typically assume unit-level treatments that do not spill over across units; (ii)...