This paper concerns the problem of inferring the effects of covariates on intergenerational income mobility, i.e. on the relationship between the incomes of parents and future earnings of their children. We focus on two different measures of mobility - (i) traditional transition probability of...

This paper develops nonparametric methods for welfare-analysis of economic changes in the common setting of multinomial choice. The results cover (a) simultaneous price-change of multiple alternatives, (b) introduction/elimination of an option, (c) changes in choice-characteristics, and (d)...

This paper concerns the problem of allocating a binary treatment among a target population based on observed covariates. The goal is to (i) maximize the mean social welfare arising from an eventual outcome distribution, when a budget constraint limits what fraction of the population can be...

Does increasing diversity in university-intake require sacrificing academic performance, and if so, by how much? We develop an empirical framework to explore this trade-off ex-post, using admissions-data matched with post-admission academic outcomes. We propose a simple, theoretical model of...

The econometric literature on program-evaluation and optimal treatment-choice takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social-welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities, whereas the utility-based welfare-analysis tradition in public-finance ignores unobserved...

This paper shows that the finite-dimensional parameters of a monotone-index model can be estimated by minimizing an objective function based on sorting the data. The key observation guiding this procedure is that the sum of distances between pairs of adjacent observations is minimized (over all...