The identification of average causal effects of a treatment in observational studies is typically based either on the unconfoundedness assumption or on the availability of an instrument. When available, instruments may also be used to test for the unconfoundedness assumption (exogeneity of the...

This paper shows that import exposure affects voting behavior because it affects local labor markets. We develop a new framework for mediation analysis where one instrumental variable is sufficient to identify three causal effects. Using German data from 1987–2009, we find that import exposure...

Knowledge of treatment effect heterogeneity or "essential heterogeneity" plays an important role in our understanding of how programs work and in the design of systems to allocate them among the eligible. This paper provides a relatively non-technical survey of the current state of the treatment...

Instrumental variables (IV) are a common means to identify treatment effects. But standard IV methods do not allow us to unpack the complex treatment effects that arise when a treatment and its outcome together cause a second outcome of interest. For example, IV methods have been used to show...

Participation in social programs is often misreported in survey data, complicating the estimation of the effects of those programs. In this paper, we propose a model to estimate treatment effects under endogenous participation and endogenous misreporting. We show that failure to account for...

The key assumption in regression discontinuity analysis is that the distribution of potential outcomes varies smoothly with the running variable around the cutoff. In many empirical contexts, however, this assumption is not credible; and the running variable is said to be manipulated in this...

This paper proposes a nonparametric method for evaluating treatment effects in the presence of both treatment endogeneity and attrition/non-response bias, using two instrumental variables. Making use of a discrete instrument for the treatment and a continuous instrument for...

Participation in social programs is often misreported in survey data, complicating the estimation of the effects of those programs. In this paper we propose a model to estimate treatment effect under endogenous participation and endogenous misreporting. We show that failure to account for...