Marginal outcome tests compare the expected effects of a decision on individuals who are of different races but at the same indifference point of the decision-maker. I present a simple formalization of how such tests can detect racial bias, defined as a deviation from accurate statistical...

We present and discuss preliminary evidence suggesting that credit ratings significantly influenced prices for subprime mortgage-backed securities issued in the period leading up to the recent financial crisis. Ratings are closely correlated with prices even controlling for a rich set of...

Economics tends to define and measure discrimination as disparities stemming from the direct (causal) effects of protected group membership. But work in other fields notes that such measures are incomplete, as they can miss important systemic (i.e. indirect) channels. For example, racial...

A longstanding and influential view in U.S. correctional policy is that "nothing works" when it comes to rehabilitating incarcerated individuals. We revisit this hypothesis by studying an innovative law-enforcement-led program launched in the county jail of Flint, Michigan: Inmate Growth...

We develop new quasi-experimental tools to understand algorithmic discrimination and build non-discriminatory algorithms when the outcome of interest is only selectively observed. These tools are applied in the context of pretrial bail decisions, where conventional algorithmic predictions are...

Many personal and policy decisions turn on perceptions of school effectiveness, defined here as the causal effect of attendance at a particular school or set of schools on student test scores and other outcomes. Widely-disseminated school ratings frameworks compare average student achievement...

Many studies in economics use instruments or treatments which combine a set of exogenous shocks with other predetermined variables by a known formula. Examples include shift-share instruments and measures of social or spatial spillovers. We review recent econometric tools for this setting, which...

Pragmatic cancer screening trials mimic real-world scenarios in which patients and doctors are the ultimate arbiters of treatment. Intention-to-screen (ITS) analyses of such trials maintain randomization-based apples-to-apples comparisons, but differential adherence (the failure of subjects...

Ten percent of Black children in the U.S. spend time in foster care--twice the rate of white children. We estimate unwarranted disparities in foster care placement decisions, adjusting for differences in the potential for future maltreatment by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of cases to...

Recent work shows that popular partially-linear regression specifications can put negative weights on some treatment effects, potentially producing incorrectly-signed estimands. We counter by showing that negative weights are no problem in design-based specifications, in which low-dimensional...