An important goal when analyzing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome is to understand the mechanisms through which the treatment causally works. We define a causal mechanism effect of a treatment and the causal effect net of that mechanism using the potential outcomes framework. These...

This paper proposes a decomposition of the composition effect, i.e. the part of the observed between-group difference in the distribution of some economic outcome that can be explained by differences in the distribution of covariates. Our decomposition contains three types of components: (i) the...

An important goal when analyzing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome is to understand the mechanisms through which the treatment causally works. We define a causal mechanism effect of a treatment and the causal effect net of that mechanism using the potential outcomes framework. These...

This paper proposes a decomposition of the composition effect, i.e. the part of the observed between-group difference in the distribution of some economic outcome that can be explained by differences in the distribution of covariates. Our decomposition contains three types of components: (i) the...

As the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed in the U.S., “hotspots” have been shifting geographically over time to suburban and rural counties showing a high prevalence of the disease. We analyze daily U.S. county-level variations in COVID-19 confirmed case counts to evaluate the spatial...

This paper aims to make contributions to comparative analysis of regional economic dynamics in China and the US from the methodological perspective. More specifically, some recent advances in exploratory space-time data analysis (ESTDA) will be suggested and implemented to conduct this task in...

It is a common assumption that regions within the same country converge to approximately the same steady-state income levels. The so-called absolute convergence hypothesis focuses on initial income levels to account for the variability in income growth among regions. Empirical data seem to...

Recent research in international economics highlights the role of interdependencies of investment decisions and sales of multinational firms. Previous work focused on and provided evidence for aggregate flows or stocks of foreign direct investment, showing that interdependence declines in...

The U.S. labor market has been experiencing unprecedented high average unemployment duration. The shift in the unemployment duration distribution can be traced back to the early nineties. In this study, censored quantile regression methods are employed to analyze the changes in the US...

We characterize the bias of propensity score based estimators of common average treatment effect parameters in the case of selection on unobservables. We then propose a new minimum biased estimator of the average treatment effect. We assess the finite sample performance of our estimator using...