The Business Cycle Dating Committee (BCDC) of the National Bureau of Economic Research provides a historical chronology of business cycle turning points. This paper investigates three central aspects about this chronology: (1) How skillful is the BCDC in classifying economic activity into...

This paper introduces a new empirical strategy for the characterization of business cycles. It combines non-parametric decoding methods that classify a series into expansions and recessions but does not require specification of the underlying stochastic process generating the data. It then uses...

In the causal inference literature a class of semi-parametric estimators is called robust if the estimator has desirable properties under the assumption that at least one of the working models is correctly specified. A standard example is a doubly robust estimator that specifies parametric...

In observational studies, the non-parametric estimation of a binary treatment effect is often performed by matching each treated individual with a control unit which is similar in observed characteristics (covariates). In practical applications, the reservoir of covariates available may be...

An estimand of interest in empirical studies with observational data is the average treatment effect of a multi-valued treatment in the treated subpopulation. We demonstrate three estimation approaches: outcome regression, inverse probability weighting and inverse probability weighted...