The paper presents a response to Gelman and Imbens (2013). There are two answers to the reverse causal question. The observed statistical relationship between two observables may be causal or "spurious." The solution to the reverse causal question is the solution that identifies the model that...

The paper generalizes ideas presented on bounds of treatment effects (Manski (1990)) to bounding the joint distribution of treatment outcomes. Frechet-Hoeffding bounds are sharp for the distribution of treatment outcomes from unconfounded data and Manski bounds are sharp for the distribution of...

This paper shows that differences in median survival rates are not be informative of a drug's effectiveness. The existence or lack of existence of a difference does not inform public policy or patient decision making. Moreover, other commonly used summary measures such as Kaplan-Meier plots and...

This paper analyzes the value of using data from on-line auctions to determine product market definitions and competitive effects of mergers. Traditionally this type of demand analysis has been based on retail transaction data, particularly "scanner" data. However, such data is not always...

A basic tenet of incentive theory states that there is a trade-off between risk and incentives. By implication, greater variation in firm profits leads to a reduction in the use of profit sharing. Surprisingly, there is little empirical evidence for this relationship. This paper reexamines the...

The paper empirically analyzes the economic theory and intuition that the "free rider" problem will overwhelm firm-wide incentives in large firms. Kandel and Lazear (1992) claim that in a simple model of an equitable partnership, Nash equilibrium effort levels fall with the number of partners -...

On October 27, 2005, the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission hosted a roundtable on the Economics of Internet Auctions. This one-day conference brought together academic experts, industry professionals and government economists to discuss and learn about Internet auctions. This...

The paper presents conditions for non-parametric identification of a joint distribution when the marginal distributions are identified and the joint distribution is partially identified. Specifically, the paper considers the problem of estimating a J-dimensional Roy Model and shows that the...

The paper presents conditions for non-parametric identification of a joint distribution when the marginal distributions are identified and the joint distribution is only identified for a subset of the domain. This result is applied to sealed bid auctions where bidders face competing auctions for...

The paper presents exclusion restrictions that allow identification of returns to schooling using data from the National Survey of Young Men (1966) (NLSYM66). The approach does not use instrumental variables (IV) or control function approaches. Instead, a non-parametric finite mixture model is...