Many commonly used treatment effects estimators rely on the unconfoundedness assumption ("selection on observables") which is fundamentally non-testable. When evaluating the effects of labor market policies, researchers need to observe variables that affect both treatment participation and labor...

This paper assesses whether a causal relationship exists between recent increases in female labor force participation and the increased prevalence of obesity amongst women. The expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the 1980s and 1990s have been established by prior literature as...

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...

A large part of the recent literature on program evaluation has focused on estimation of the average effect of the treatment under assumptions of unconfoundedness or ignorability following the seminal work by Rubin (1974) and Rosenbaum and Rubin (1983). In many cases however, researchers are...

There is a debate on whether executive pay reflects rent extraction due to "managerial power" or is the result of arms-length bargaining in a principal-agent framework. In this paper we offer a test of the managerial power hypothesis by empirically examining the CEO compensation of U.S. public...

We study the effectiveness of nonexperimental strategies in adjusting for comparison group differences when using data from several programs, each implemented at a different location, to compare their effect if implemented at alternative locations. First, we adjust for individual characteristics...

Many commonly used treatment effects estimators rely on the unconfoundedness assumption (“selection on observables") which is fundamentally non-testable. When evaluating the effects of labor market policies, researchers need to observe variables that affect both treatment participation and...

This paper assesses the e¤ectiveness of unconfoundedness-based estimators of mean e¤ects 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 assesses whether a causal relationship exists between recent increases in female labor force participation and the increased prevalence of obesity amongst women. The expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the 1980s and 1990s have been established by prior literature as...

Estimation of average treatment effects under unconfounded or ignorable treatment assignment is often hampered by lack of overlap in the covariate distributions between treatment groups. This lack of overlap can lead to imprecise estimates, and can make commonly used estimators sensitive to the...