Ten percent of Black children in the U.S. spend time in foster care--twice the rate of white children. We estimate unwarranted disparities in foster care placement decisions, adjusting for differences in the potential for future maltreatment by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of cases to...

Researchers using instrumental variables to investigate ordered treatments often recode treatment into an indicator for any exposure. We investigate this estimand under the assumption that the instruments shift compliers from no treatment to some but not from some treatment to more. We show that...

A longstanding and influential view in U.S. correctional policy is that "nothing works" when it comes to rehabilitating incarcerated individuals. We revisit this hypothesis by studying an innovative law-enforcement-led program launched in the county jail of Flint, Michigan: Inmate Growth...

We develop new quasi-experimental tools to understand algorithmic discrimination and build non-discriminatory algorithms when the outcome of interest is only selectively observed. These tools are applied in the context of pretrial bail decisions, where conventional algorithmic predictions are...

The effect of a treatment may depend on the intensity with which it is administered. We study identification of ordered treatment effects with a binary instrument, focusing on the effect of moving from the treatment's minimum to maximum intensity. With arbitrary heterogeneity across units,...

A growing number of central authorities use assignment mechanisms to allocate students to schools in a way that reflects student preferences and school priorities. However, most real-world mechanisms incentivize students to strategically misreport their preferences. In this paper, we provide an...

We propose a new specification test to assess the validity of the judge leniency design. We characterize a set of sharp testable implications, which exploit all the relevant information in the observed data distribution to detect violations of the judge leniency design assumptions. The proposed...

How does ESG (environmental, social, and governance) performance affect stock returns? Answering this question is difficult because existing measures of ESG perfor- mance -- ESG ratings -- are noisy and, therefore, standard regression estimates suffer from attenuation bias. To address the bias,...

We provide simple tests for selection on unobserved variables in the Vytlacil-Imbens-Angrist framework for Local Average Treatment Effects (LATEs). Our setup allows researchers not only to test for selection on either or both of the treated and untreated outcomes, but also to assess the...

Many personal and policy decisions turn on perceptions of school effectiveness, defined here as the causal effect of attendance at a particular school or set of schools on student test scores and other outcomes. Widely-disseminated school ratings frameworks compare average student achievement...