It is well known that homeowners are richer than renters, even after controlling for observable characteristics. This is often used as an argument for policies that foster homeownership. However, the causal link between homeownership and wealth is difficult to establish due to many potential...

Rain affects electoral turnout both through a direct effect on the cost of voting and by changing the opportunity cost. In a panel of Norwegian municipalities I find that rain on Election Day increases turnout. As turnout affects electoral outcomes, rain provides an exogeneous source of...

We investigate the role of banks information policies in fostering the accumulation of financial knowledge. In Italy, banks belonging to the PattiChiari Consortium implement policies aimed at increasing transparency and procedural simplification, without offering services at lower cost with...

This paper provides an introduction into the estimation of Marginal Treatment Effects (MTE). Compared to the existing surveys on the subject, our paper is less technical and speaks to the applied economist with a solid basic understanding of econometric techniques who would like to use MTE...

In this paper we study the finite sample and asymptotic properties of various weighting estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE), several of which are based on Abadie (2003)’s kappa theorem. Our framework presumes a binary endogenous explanatory variable (“treatment”) and a...

Structural econometric methods are often criticized for being sensitive to functional form assumptions. We study parametric estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE) derived from a widely used class of latent threshold crossing models and show they yield LATE estimates...

This paper shows that import exposure affects voting behavior because it affects local labor markets. We develop a new framework for mediation analysis where one instrumental variable is sufficient to identify three causal effects. Using German data from 1987-2009, we find that import exposure...

Naturalization may be a relevant policy instrument affecting immigrant integration in host-country labor markets. We study the effect of naturalization on labor market outcomes of immigrants in Germany. We apply recent survey data and exploit a reform of naturalization rules in an instrumental...

We revisit the problem of estimating the local average treatment effect (LATE) and the local average treatment effect on the treated (LATT) when control variables are available, either to render the instrumental variable (IV) suitably exogenous or to improve precision. Unlike previous...

In this paper I revisit the interpretation of the linear instrumental variables (IV) estimand as a weighted average of conditional local average treatment effects (LATEs). I focus on a practically relevant situation in which additional covariates are required for identification while the...