Under the assumption of no unmeasured confounders, a large literature exists on methods that can be used to estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from observational data and that spans regression models, propensity score adjustments using stratification, weighting or regression and even the...

This paper examines the relationship between health aid and infant mortality, using data from in total 135 countries (for the purposes of this study, developing countries), between 1975 and 2010. Utilizing both conventional Instrumental Variable and System GMM approaches, a tentative conclusion...

This introduction summarizes the main contributions of the papers selected to be published in this special issue. These papers were presented (among others) in the Fourth Seminar Jean Paelinck hold in Oviedo (Spain) in 2010 and their quality justified the edition of this Special Issue. As...

We propose inverse probability weighted estimators for the distribution functions of the potential outcomes of a binary treatment under the unconfoundedness assumption. We also apply the inverse mapping on the distribution functions to obtain the quantile functions. We show that the proposed...

We construct a Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for the null hypothesis that the conditional average treatment effect is non-negative conditional on every possible value of the covariates. The null hypothesis can be characterized as a conditional moment inequality under the unconfoundedness assumption,...

There is a large theoretical literature on methods for estimating causal effects under unconfoundedness, exogeneity, or selection-on-observables type assumptions using matching or propensity score methods. Much of this literature is highly technical and has not made inroads into empirical...

We investigate the impact of monetary conditions on stock market returns at different points on the return distributions. Our results reveal no association between stock returns and monetary environments at the lower quantiles. At the upper quantiles, however, we find that expansive monetary...

The moment conditions or estimating equations for instrumental variables quantile regression involves the discontinuous indicator function. We instead use smoothed estimating equations, with bandwidth h. This is known to allow higher-order expansions that justify bootstrap refinements for...

The literature has two types of fractional order statistics: an `ideal' (unobserved) type based on a beta distribution, and an observable type linearly interpolated between consecutive order statistics. We show convergence in distribution of the two types at an O(n-1) rate, which we also show...

The literature has two types of fractional order statistics: an `ideal' (unobserved) type based on a beta distribution, and an observable type linearly interpolated between consecutive order statistics. From the nonparametric perspective of local smoothing, we examine inference on conditional...