In the practice of program evaluation, choosing the covariates and the functional form of the propensity score is an important choice for estimating treatment effects. This paper proposes data-driven model selection and model averaging procedures that address this issue for the propensity score...

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...

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...

The assumption that the assignment to treatments is ignorable conditional on attributes plays an important role in the applied statistic and econometric evaluation literature. Another term for it is conditional independence assumption. This paper discusses identification when there are more than...

We characterize the bias of propensity score based estimators of common average treatment effect parameters in the case of selection on unobservables. We then propose a new minimum biased estimator of the average treatment effect. We assess the finite sample performance of our estimator using...

Currently available asymptotic results in the literature suggest that matching estimators have higher variance than reweighting estimators. The extant literature comparing the finite sample properties of matching to specific reweighting estimators, however, has concluded that reweighting...

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.,...

The low unemployment rates traditionally enjoyed by Sweden have often been attributed to the country's extensive system of active labour market programmes, which have thus frequently been regarded as a model for other countries to emulate. However, unemployment grew enormously in Sweden when the...

This paper investigates the finite sample performance of a comprehensive set of semi- and nonparametric estimators for treatment and policy evaluation. In contrast to previous simulation studies which mostly considered semiparametric approaches relying on parametric propensity score estimation,...