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....

In this paper we study a class of weighted estimands, which we define as parameters that can be expressed as weighted averages of the underlying heterogeneous treatment effects. The popular ordinary least squares (OLS), two-stage least squares (2SLS), and two-way fixed effects (TWFE) estimands...

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 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 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...

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...

It is standard practice in applied work to study the effect of a binary variable ("treatment") on an outcome of interest using linear models with additive effects. In this paper I study the interpretation of the ordinary and two-stage least squares estimands in such models when treatment effects...

Currently there is little practical advice on which treatment effect estimator to use when trying to adjust for observable differences. A recent suggestion is to compare the performance of estimators in simulations that somehow mimic the empirical context. Two ways to run such 'empirical Monte...

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;...