In this paper nonparametric instrumental variable estimation of local average treatment effects (LATE) is extended to incorporate confounding covariates. Estimation of local average treatment effects is appealing since their identification relies on much weaker assumptions than the...

Propensity score matching is widely used in treatment evaluation to estimate average treatment effects. Nevertheless, the role of the propensity score is still controversial. Since the propensity score is usually unknown and has to be estimated, the efficiency loss arising from not knowing the...

This paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconomic policy evaluation. Particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes, which is of high relevance in practice. For example, active labour market policies may consist of...

An important goal when analyzing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome is to understand the mechanisms through which the treatment causally works. We define a causal mechanism effect of a treatment and the causal effect net of that mechanism using the potential outcomes framework. These...

This paper shows nonparametric identification of quantile treatment effects (QTE) in the regression discontinuity design. The distributional impacts of social programs such as welfare, education, training programs and unemployment insurance are of large interest to economists. QTE are an...

This paper assesses the effectiveness of unconfoundedness-based estimators of mean effects for multiple or multivalued treatments in eliminating biases arising from nonrandom treatment assignment. We evaluate these multiple treatment estimators by simultaneously equalizing average outcomes among...

This paper proposes a decomposition of the composition effect, i.e. the part of the observed between-group difference in the distribution of some economic outcome that can be explained by differences in the distribution of covariates. Our decomposition contains three types of components: (i) the...

We propose a specification test for a wide range of parametric models for the conditional distribution function of an outcome variable given a vector of covariates. The test is based on the Cramer-von Mises distance between an unrestricted estimate of the joint distribution function of the data,...

In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the effect of a counterfactual change in the unconditional distribution of a single covariate on the unconditional distribution of an outcome variable of interest. Both fixed and infinitesimal changes are considered. We show that such effects are...