Studies of racial discrimination often condition on endogenous measures of race or on earlier decisions that might themselves be affected by discrimination. We develop quasi-experimental tools for estimating the impact of racial misclassification on measures of unwarranted disparity, and for...

Black children in the U.S. are twice as likely as white children to spend time in foster care. Such racial disparities raise concerns of discrimination, but might also reflect differences in the underlying need for intervention. This paper estimates unwarranted disparities (UDs)--racial...

A recent econometric literature shows two distinct paths for identification with shift-share instruments, leveraging either many exogenous shifts or exogenous shares. We present the core logic of both paths and practical takeaways via simple checklists. A variety of empirical settings illustrate...

The ISCHEMIA Trial randomly assigned patients with ischemic heart disease to an invasive treatment strategy centered on revascularization with a control group assigned non-invasive medical therapy. As is common in such "strategy trials," many participants assigned to treatment remained untreated...

We develop new tools for estimating the causal effects of treatments or instruments that combine multiple sources of variation according to a known formula. Examples include treatments capturing spillovers in social and transportation networks, simulated instruments for policy eligibility, and...

We develop new quasi-experimental tools to measure disparate impact, regardless of its source, in the context of bail decisions. We show that omitted variables bias in pretrial release rate comparisons can be purged by using the quasi-random assignment of judges to estimate average pretrial...

Lottery estimates suggest oversubscribed urban charter schools boost student achievement markedly. But these estimates needn't capture treatment effects for students who haven't applied to charter schools or for students attending charters for which demand is weak. This paper reports estimates...