People tend to contribute to a charity only when they are asked to. Although this so-called 'power of asking' is a well-known technique among fundraisers, the existing literature does not pay much attention to the role of donation requests in charitable giving. We estimate the causal effects of...

We study investment in education in an overlapping generation model with altruism where credit market imperfections ration borrowing and cause persistent underinvestment in human capital. We characterize the optimal government policy and the policy that would emerge under majority voting in...

We study identification and estimation in a binary response model with random coefficients B allowed to be correlated with regressors X. Our objective is to identify the mean of the distribution of B and estimate a trimmed mean of this distribution. Like Imbens and Newey (2009), we use...

Individual players in a simultaneous equation binary choice model act differently in different environments in ways that are frequently not captured by observables and a simple additive random error. This paper proposes a random coefficient specification to capture this type of heterogeneity in...

This paper provides a few variants of a simple estimator for binary choice models with endogenous or mismeasured regressors, or with heteroskedastic errors, or with panel fixed effects. Unlike control function methods, which are generally only valid when endogenous regressors are continuous, the...

We discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of four types of convenient estimators of binary choice models when regressors may be endogenous or mismeasured, or when errors are likely to be heteroskedastic. For example, such models arise when treatment is not randomly assigned and...

Regression discontinuity models, where the probability of treatment jumps discretely when a running variable crosses a threshold, are commonly used to nonparametrically identify and estimate a local average treatment effect. We show that the derivative of this treatment effect with respect to...

This paper provides estimators of discrete choice models, including binary, ordered, and multinomial response (choice) models. The estimators closely resemble ordinary and two stage least squares. The distribution of the model's latent variable error is unknown and may be related to the...

We consider estimation of means of functions that are scaled by an unknown density, or equivalently, integrals of conditional expectations. The "ordered data" estimator we provide is root n consistent, asymptotically normal, and is numerically extremely simple, involving little more than...

The method of indirect least squares (ILS) using a proxy for a discrete instrument is shown to identify a weighted average of local treatment effects. The weights are nonnegative if and only if the proxy is intensity preserving for the instrument. A similar result holds for instrumental...