Many believe that "big data" will transform business, government and other aspects of the economy. In this article we discuss how new data may impact economic policy and economic research. Large-scale administrative datasets and proprietary private sector data can greatly improve the way we...

Haavelmo's seminal 1943 paper is the first rigorous treatment of causality. In it, he distinguished the definition of causal parameters from their identification. He showed that causal parameters are defined using hypothetical models that assign variation to some of the inputs determining...

This paper provides empirical evidence of an established theoretical result: in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects, OLS is generally not a consistent estimator of the sample-weighted average treatment effect (SWE). We propose two alternative estimators that do recover the SWE in the...

Individual outcomes are highly correlated with group average outcomes, a fact often interpreted as a causal peer effect. Without covariates, however, outcome-on-outcome peer effects are vacuous, either unity or, if the average is defined as leave-out, determined by a generic intraclass...

We ask whether failing one or more of the state-mandated high-school exit examinations affects whether students graduate from high school. Using a new multi-dimensional regression-discontinuity approach, we examine simultaneously scores on mathematics and English language arts tests. Barely...

The purpose of this paper is to study identification and estimation of causal effects in experiments with multiple sources of noncompliance. This research design arises in many applications in education when access to oversubscribed programs is partially determined by randomization. Eligible...

Lottery estimates suggest oversubscribed urban charter schools boost student achievement markedly. But these estimates needn’t capture treatment effects for students who haven’t applied to charter schools or for students attending charters for which demand is weak. This paper reports...

This paper assesses the validity and accuracy of firms' backward patent citations as a measure of knowledge flows from public research by employing a newly constructed dataset that matches patents to survey data at the level of the R&D lab. Using survey-based measures of the dimensions of...

Extremely long odds accompany the chance that spurious-regression bias accounts for investor sentiment's observed role in stock-return anomalies. We replace investor sentiment with a simulated persistent series in regressions reported by Stambaugh, Yu and Yuan (2012), who find higher long-short...

We address the ordinality of test scores by rescaling them by the average eventual educational attainment of students with a given test score in a given grade. We show that measurement error in test scores causes this approach to underestimate the black-white test score gap and use an...