Instrumental Variables (IV) methods identify internally valid causal effects for individuals whose treatment status is manipulable by the instrument at hand. Inference for other populations requires some sort of homogeneity assumption. This paper outlines a theoretical framework that nests all...

The view that empirical strategies in economics should be transparent and credible now goes almost without saying. The local average treatment effects (LATE) framework for causal inference helped make this so. The LATE theorem tells us for whom particular instrumental variables (IV) and...

A longstanding question in the economics of the family is the relationship between sibship size and subsequent human capital formation and economic welfare. If there is a "quantity-quality trade-off," then policies that discourage large families should lead to increased human capital, higher...

Time series data are widely used to explore causal relationships, typically in a regression framework with lagged dependent variables. Regression-based causality tests rely on an array of functional form and distributional assumptions for valid causal inference. This paper develops a...

Using a sample of control cross-border acquisitions from 61 countries from 1990 to 2007, we find that acquirers from countries with better governance gain more from such acquisitions and their gains are higher when targets are from countries with worse governance. Other acquirer country...

From 1973 to 2014, the common stock of U.S. banks with loan growth in the top quartile of banks over a three-year period significantly underperforms the common stock of banks with loan growth in the bottom quartile over the next three years. The benchmark-adjusted cumulative difference in...

This paper introduces an instrumental variables estimator for the effect of a binary treatment on the quantiles of potential outcomes. The quantile treatment effects (QTE) estimator accommodates exogenous covariates and reduces to quantile regression as a special case when treatment status is...

The majority of armed forces veterans make use of the subsidized training and educational benefits provided by the Department of Veterans Affairs. The effect of veterans benefits on educational attainment am civilian earnings is estimated here using the Census Bureau's 1987 Survey of Veterans....

Many centralized matching schemes incorporate a mix of random lottery and non-lottery tie-breaking. A leading example is the New York City public school district, which uses criteria like test scores and interviews to generate applicant rankings for some schools, combined with lottery...