The impact of school resources on the quality of education in developing countries may depend crucially on whether resources are targeted efficiently. In this paper we use a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralized a portion of the...

The use of genetic markers as instrumental variables (IV) is receiving increasing attention from economists. This paper examines the conditions that need to be met for genetic variants to be used as instruments. We combine the IV literature with that from genetic epidemiology, with an...

This paper estimates the marginal returns to college for individuals induced to enroll in college by different marginal policy changes. The recent instrumental variables literature seeks to estimate this parameter, but in general it does so only under strong assumptions that are tested and found...

One of the main objectives of empirical analysis of experiments and quasi-experiments is to inform policy decisions that determine the allocation of treatments to individuals with different observable covariates. We propose the Empirical Welfare Maximization (EWM) method, which estimates a...

One of the main objectives of empirical analysis of experiments and quasi-experiments is to inform policy decisions that determine the allocation of treatments to individuals with different observable covariates. We study the properties and implementation of the Empirical Welfare Maximization...

This paper studies nonparametric estimation of conditional moment models in which the residual functions could be nonsmooth with respect to the unknown functions of endogenous variables. It is a problem of nonparametric nonlinear instrumental variables (IV) estimation, and a difficult nonlinear...

Suppose that a target function is monotonic, namely weakly increasing, and an original estimate of this target function is available, which is not weakly increasing. Many common estimation methods used in statistics produce such estimates. We show that these estimates can always be improved with...

Parametric copulas are shown to be attractive devices for specifying quantile autoregressive models for nonlinear time-series. Estimation of local, quantile-specific copula-based time series models offers some salient advantages over classical global parametric approaches. Consistency and...