This paper is about identification and estimation in a triangular nonparametric structural model with instrumental variables and non-additive errors. Identification and estimation is based on a control function consisting of the conditional distribution function of the endogenous variable given...

In this essay I discuss potential outcome and graphical approaches to causality, and their relevance for empirical work in economics. I review some of the work on directed acyclic graphs, including the recent "The Book of Why," ([Pearl and Mackenzie, 2018]). I also discuss the potential outcome...

I review recent work in the statistics literature on instrumental variables methods from an econometrics perspective. I discuss some of the older, economic, applications including supply and demand models and relate them to the recent applications in settings of randomized experiments with...

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...

A large part of the recent literature on program evaluation has focused on estimation of theaverage 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...

Properties of GMM estimators are sensitive to the choice of instruments. Usingmany instruments leads to high asymptotic asymptotic efficiency but can causehigh bias and/or variance in small samples. In this paper we develop and implementasymptotic mean square error (MSE) based criteria for...

We develop and analyze a tractable empirical model for strategic network formation that can be estimated with data from a single network at a single point in time. We model the network formation as a sequential process where in each period a single randomly selected pair of agents has the...

We investigate the problem of optimal choice of the smoothing parameter (bandwidth) for the regression discontinuity estimator. We focus on estimation by local linear regression, which was shown to be rate optimal (Porter, 2003). We derive the optimal bandwidth. This optimal bandwidth depends on...