A comparison of hazard rates of duration outcomes before and after policy changes is hampered by non-identification if there is unobserved heteogeneity in the effects and no model structure is imposed. We develop a discontinuity approach that overcomes this by exploiting variation in the moment...

Causal effects of a policy change on the hazard rates of a duration outcome variable are not identified from a comparison of spells before and after the policy change when there is unobserved heterogeneity in the effects and no model structure is imposed. We develop a discontinuity approach that...

Average treatment effects estimands can present significant bias under the presence of outliers. Moreover, outliers can be particularly hard to detect, creating bias and inconsistency in the semi-parametric ATE estimads. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that...