This paper provides a method for the analysis of the spatial and temporal diffusion of shocks in a dynamic system. We use changes in real house prices within the UK economy at the level of regions to illustrate its use. Adjustment to shocks involves both a region specific and a spatial effect....

It is standard practice in applied work to rely on linear least squares regression to estimate the effect of a binary variable ("treatment") on some outcome of interest. In this paper I study the interpretation of the regression estimand when treatment effects are in fact heterogeneous. I show...

In most modern democracies elected officials can work in the private sector while appointed in parliament. We show that when the political and market sectors are not mutually exclusive, a trade-off arises between the quality of elected officials and the effort they exert in political life. If...

An important issue in the analysis of cross-sectional dependence which has received renewed interest in the past few years is the need for a better understanding of the extent and nature of such cross dependencies. In this paper we focus on measures of cross-sectional dependence and how such...

In this paper I develop a new version of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition whose unexplained component recovers a parameter which I refer to as the average wage gap. Under a particular conditional independence assumption, this estimand is equivalent to the average treatment effect (ATE). I also...

In this paper I develop a consistent estimator of the population average treatment effect (PATE) which is based on a nonstandard version of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. As a result, I extend the recent literature which has utilized the treatment effects framework to reinterpret this...

In this paper we evaluate the premise from the recent literature on Monte Carlo studies that an empirically motivated simulation exercise is informative about the actual ranking of various estimators when applied to a particular problem. We consider two alternative designs and provide an...

In this paper we study doubly robust estimators of various average treatment effects under unconfoundedness. We unify and extend much of the recent literature by providing a very general identification result which covers binary and multi-valued treatments; unnormalized and normalized weighting;...

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...

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 binary...