Instrumental variables (IV) are a common means to identify treatment effects. But standard IV methods do not allow us to unpack the complex treatment effects that arise when a treatment and its outcome together cause a second outcome of interest. For example, IV methods have been used to show...

This paper measures impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. We use removal tendencies of child protection investigators as an instrument. We focus on young children investigated before age 6 and find that removal significantly increases test scores and...

Existing research on the static effects of the manipulation of welfare program benefit parameters on labor supply has allowed only restrictive forms of heterogeneity in preferences. Yet preference heterogeneity implies that the marginal effects of welfare reforms on labor supply may differ in...

We build a publicly available platform that tracks economic activity at a granular level in real time using anonymized data from private companies. We report daily statistics on consumer spending, business revenues, employment rates, and other key indicators disaggregated by county, industry,...

Comparing median outcomes to gauge treatment effectiveness is widespread practice in clinical and other investigations. While common, such difference-in-median characterizations of effectiveness are but one way to summarize how outcome distributions compare. This paper explores properties of...

Participation in social programs is often misreported in survey data, complicating the estimation of the effects of those programs. In this paper, we propose a model to estimate treatment effects under endogenous participation and endogenous misreporting. We show that failure to account for...

Many empirical questions in economics and other social sciences depend on causal effects of programs or policiy interventions. In the last two decades much research has been done on the econometric and statistical analysis of the effects of such programs or treatments. This recent theoretical...

Survey non-response has risen in recent years which has increased the share of imputed and underreported values found on commonly used datasets. While this trend has been well-documented for earnings, the growth in non-response to government transfers questions has received far less attention....

In this paper, we assess whether welfare reform affects earnings only through mean impacts that are constant within but vary across subgroups. This is important because researchers interested in treatment effect heterogeneity typically restrict their attention to estimating mean impacts that are...

Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using U.S. state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts. Differential changes across states during this period, such as...