Previous research has estimated that food insecure children are more likely to suffer from a wide array of negative health outcomes than food secure children, leading many to claim that alleviating food insecurity would lead to better health outcomes. Identifying the causal impacts is...

The existing evaluations of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) agree on a beneficial association with birth weight but not necessarily gestation age. Regardless, considerable doubt exists over whether these associations represent a causal...

Treatment analyses based on average outcomes do not immediately generalize to the case of ordered responses because the expectation of an ordinally measured variable does not exist. The proposed remedy in this paper is a shift in focus to distributional effects. Assuming a threshold crossing...

This paper explores semi-monotonicity constraints in the distribution of potential outcomes, first, conditional on an instrument, and second, in terms of the response function. The imposed assumptions are strictly weaker than traditional instrumental variables assumptions and can be gainfully...

While laboratory experiments documenting some level of irrational behavior are now commonplace, explorations into whether such irrationalities exist in the field are rare. Equally as scarce are studies that explore the influence of market experience on the level and evolution of irrationality....

Instrumental variables can be used to make inferences about causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. For a model in which the instrument, intermediate/treatment, and outcome variables are all binary, Balke and Pearl (1997, Journal of the American Statistical Association 92:...

We derive nonparametric bounds for local average treatment effects without requiring the exclusion restriction assumption to hold or an outcome with a bounded support. Instead, we employ assumptions requiring weak monotonicity of mean potential outcomes within or across subpopulations defined by...

This paper investigates Monotone Instrumental Variables (MIV) and their ability to aid in identifying treatment effects when the treatment is binary in a nonparametric bounding framework. I show that an MIV can only aid in identification beyond that of a Monotone Treatment Selection assumption...

This paper analyzes the identifying power of weak convexity assumptions in treatment effect models with endogenous selection. The counterfactual distributions are constrained either in terms of the response function, or conditional on the realized treatment, and sharp bounds on the potential...

This paper analyzes estimators based on the instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) model (Chernozhukov and Hansen, 2004, 2005, 2006) under the local quantile treatment effects (LQTE) framework (Abadie et al., 2002). I show that the quantile treatment effect (QTE) estimators in the IVQR...