Researchers are often interested in estimating the causal effect of some treatment on individual criminality. For example, two recent relatively prominent papers have attempted to estimate the respective direct effects of marriage and gang participation on individual criminal activity. One...

Estimators of average treatment effects under unconfounded treatment assignment are known to become rather imprecise if there is limited overlap in the covariate distributions between the treatment groups. But such limited overlap can also have a detrimental effect on inference, and lead for...

In this paper we perform inference on the effect of a treatment on survival times in studies where the treatment assignment is not randomized and the assignment time is not known in advance. Two such studies are discussed: a heart transplant program and a study of Swedish unemployed eligible for...

We examine how emerging market (EM) investors allocate their stock portfolios internationally. Using both country-level and institution-level data, we find that the coming wave of EM investors systematically over- and under-weight their holdings in some target countries. These abnormal foreign...

The production and diffusion of knowledge have increasingly been seen as potential causes of the observed international differences in total factor productivity and, in turn, as possible sources of economic growth. This paper presents the results of a causality study between business visits and...

This paper develops and estimates a model with multiple schooling choices that identifies the causal effect of different levels of schooling on health, health-related behaviors, and labor market outcomes. We develop an approach that is a halfway house between a reduced form treatment effect...

This paper estimates returns to education using a dynamic model of educational choice that synthesizes approaches in the structural dynamic discrete choice literature with approaches used in the reduced form treatment effect literature. It is an empirically robust middle ground between the two...

This paper studies the dynamics of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since the outbreak of the Second (or "Al-Aqsa") Intifada in September 2000, during which more than 3,300 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis have been killed. The conflict has followed an uneven pattern, with...

The recent increase in the minimum wage in Romania in early May 2016 represented a popular topic at the national level, which indicated that aggressive increases in the minimum wage could create a competitiveness problem in the context of a relatively high level of informal economic activities....

Common mental health problems impose significant costs on individuals and societies, yet healthcare systems often overlook them. We provide the first causal evidence on the effectiveness of a pioneering, nationwide mental health service for treating depression and anxiety disorders in England...