This paper specifies a general set of conditions under which the impacts of a policy can be identified using data generated under a different policy regime. We show that some of the policy impacts can be identified under relatively weak conditions on the data and structure of a model. Based on...

This paper is an expository review of recently developed techniques that are designed to evaluate macroeconomic policy using econometric models ; The exposition focuses on dynamic stochastic models with rational expectations and with discrete time. The method of undetermined coefficients is used...

The paper reviews recent developments in macroeconomic theory and their implications for econometric modelling and for policy design. The following issues are addressed. 1) The theoretical and practical problems of modelling sequence economies. 2) Problems of evaluating the role of money given...

Econometric analyses of treatment response commonly use instrumental variable (IV) assumptions to identify treatment effects. Yet the credibility of IV assumptions is often a matter of considerable disagreement, with much debate about whether some covariate is or is not a "valid instrument" in...

This paper provides a unified framework for interpreting a wide range of interactions models which have appeared in the economics literature. A formalization taken from the statistical mechanics literature is shown to encompass a number of socioeconomic phenomena ranging from out of wedlock...

Investigators of social differentials in health outcomes commonly augment incomplete micro data by appending socioeconomic characteristics of residential areas (such as median income in a zip code) to proxy for individual characteristics. However, little empirical attention has been paid to how...

This paper considers the use of instrumental variables to estimate the mean effect of treatment on the treated. It reviews previous work on this topic by Heckman and Robb (1985, 1986) and demonstrates that (a) unless the effect of treatment is the same for everyone (conditional on observables),...

Using research designs patterned after randomized experiments, many recent economic studies examine outcome measures for treatment groups and comparison groups that are not randomly assigned. By using variation in explanatory variables generated by changes in state laws, government draft...

This paper considers the statistical and economic justification for one widely-used method of adjusting data from social experiments to account for dropping-out behavior due to Bloom (1984). We generalize the method to apply to distributions not just means, and present tests of the key...

In this paper we develop alternative ways to compare asset pricing models when it is understood that their implied stochastic discount factors do not price all portfolios correctly. Unlike comparisons based on x2 statistics associated with null hypothesis that models are correct, our measures of...