This paper describes a range of methods which have been proposed to study interactions in economic and social contexts. By interactions, we refer to interdependences between individual decisions which are not mediated by markets. These types of models have been employed to understand phenomena...

This paper considers regression-based tests for encompassing, when none of the models under consideration encompasses all the other models. For both in- and out-of-sample applications, I derive asymptotic distributions and propose feasible procedures to construct confidence intervals and test...

This paper analyzes the performance of heteroskedasticity-and-autocorrelation-consistent (HAC) covariance matrix estimators in which the residuals are prewhitened using a vector autoregressive (VAR) filter. We highlight the pitfalls of using an arbitrarily fixed lag order for the VAR filter, and...

In this paper we consider conditions under which the estimation of a log-linearized Euler equation for consumption yields consistent estimates of the preference parameters. When utility is isoelastic and a sample covering a long time period is available, consistent estimates are obtained from...

We are interested in estimating the average effect of a binary treatment on a scalar outcome. If assignment to the treatment is independent of the potential outcomes given pretreatment variables, biases associated with simple treatment-control average comparisons can be removed by adjusting for...

In many time series models, an infinite number of moments can be used for estimation in a large sample. I supply a technically undemanding proof of a condition for optimal instrumental variables use of such moments in a parametric model. I also illustrate application of the condition in...

Data on health care expenditures, length of stay, utilization of health services, consumption of unhealthy commodities, etc. are typically characterized by: (a) nonnegative outcomes; (b) nontrivial fractions of zero outcomes in the population (and sample); and (c) positively-skewed distributions...

In applied econometric work, analysts are concerned often with estimation of and inferences about interaction effects, e.g. 'Does the magnitude of the effect of z1 on y depend on z2? ' This paper develops tests for and proper interpretation of various forms of interaction effects in one...

The problem of how to control for covariates is endemic in evaluation research. Covariate-matching provides an appealing control strategy, but with continuous or high-dimensional covariate vectors, exact matching may be impossible or involve small cells. Matching observations that have the same...

Estimation of average treatment effects in observational, or non-experimental in pre-treatment variables. If the number of pre-treatment variables is large, and their distribution varies substantially with treatment status, standard adjustment methods such as covariance adjustment are often...