The econometrics arXiv, with citations

We study difference-in-differences (DID) estimation of average treatment effects on the treated when the researcher is uncertain about which pre-treatment periods satisfy the parallel trends assumption. Roth (2022) shows that pre-trend testing can induce bias, complementing the statistical literature on post-selection inference. We propose the model averaged difference-in-differences (MADID) estimator, a weighted average of the candidate $2\times2$ DID e…

Finding which variables cause which others in multivariate time series, and at what lags, is central to science and policy, yet existing methods force a choice between flexible confounder adjustment, data-driven lag selection, and inference that controls the false discovery rate (FDR). ORACLE-VARX does all three in one pipeline. First, double/debiased machine learning (DML) removes nonlinear confounder effects from the outcomes and the lagged series. Sec…

Synthetic control relies on pre-treatment fit to balance the unobserved factors that drive untreated outcomes. The argument fails when an observed common shock, such as a commodity price, moves with the latent factors before treatment and departs from them afterwards and pre-treatment fit then says almost nothing about the synthetic unit's exposure to the shock. I derive a period-specific bound that links the post-treatment bias of any weighting estimato…

Clinical trials with survival endpoints lose information when participants are censored before death is observed. We develop target-preserving estimators that use posttreatment disease history, such as recurrence or progression, to recover information lost to censoring for marginal survival and restricted mean survival effects. The difficulty is that the intermediate event is downstream of treatment: naive adjustment can change the causal estimand, and t…

Matrix autoregressive (MAR) models offer a parsimonious framework for modeling matrix-valued time series, yet tools for estimation and inference for their impulse response functions are lacking. We develop asymptotic and bootstrap-based inference for impulse responses of stable MAR($p$) models. We derive the joint asymptotic distribution of the coefficient and covariance estimators, which permits closed-form delta-method standard errors. To address finit…

A new form of the fiscal multiplier suited to data expressed as gross growth rates is proposed, together with a structural vector autoregression that isolates discretionary fiscal policy from regime and rule-based components. Because cumulating growth-rate responses over a horizon involves a product rather than a sum, the proposed multiplier is multiplicative: both numerator and denominator are polynomials in the size of the fiscal impulse, so the multip…

A common empirical strategy in triple-differences (DDD) is to include either covariate trends or covariate levels to a three-way fixed effects (3WFE) regression. This strategy is typically motivated by the conditional parallel gaps assumption which assumes that deviations from parallel trends are similar among units with comparable observed covariates. We formally study both 3WFE specifications and show that, in general, neither consistently estimates th…

Random assignment can make ordinary least squares (OLS) inference insensitive to outcome dependence, yet iid resampling can still fail because assignment and resampling need not remove the same covariance terms. With binary treatment, the iid variance target differs from the sampling variance by exactly minus aggregate cross-unit covariance of treatment effects. Under a Gaussian first-order limit, positive covariance leads to over-rejection and negative…

Imperfect measurements allow different underlying distributions to generate the same observations. Restrictions linking unobserved components can make it difficult to characterize all compatible distributions and compute the resulting range of parameter values. We ask how to construct computable parameter bounds and tighten them without additional data or stronger assumptions. We develop a general framework for partial identification under imperfect meas…

This study develops a survey-calibrated, path-dependent agent-based microsimulation for evaluating crime and violence reduction policies in Bolivia. A synthetic population is constructed from the 2025 Household Survey and the fourth-quarter 2025 Continuous Employment Survey using official expansion weights and cross-survey donor matching. The model combines heterogeneous agents, place-based risk, criminal adaptation, institutional capacity, community org…

Cross-fitting is routine in much of applied research. While conventional confidence intervals that ignore cross-fold dependence are asymptotically valid in several settings, they undercover in many applications that share a common form of nonregularity: from the classic cross-validation problem of testing whether a fitted model outperforms another, to testing for heterogeneous treatment effects with machine learning, to estimating the value of a potentia…

Many policies assign treatment according to whether a score crosses a cutoff. Regression discontinuity (RD) designs identify the effect of treatment assignment, but the threshold policy itself may also reshape individuals' incentives, inducing behavioral responses that affect outcomes even holding treatment status fixed---a channel that conventional RD designs cannot capture. We develop a framework that exploits randomized variation in policy thresholds,…

This study considers the problem of portfolio choice, where we recommend a portfolio to an investor to maximize the expected utility of their wealth. Our goal is to construct an asymptotically optimal portfolio choice rule in terms of expected utility regret, the difference between the expected utility of an oracle investor and that achieved by a portfolio chosen from data. We propose the Expected Utility Regret (EUR) rule, which jointly selects a portfo…

Text, images, and other rich covariates are increasingly compressed into AI-learned representations and then used as controls in causal analysis. We study when this approach is valid and develop a practical framework for causal inference with learned representations. For a broad class of estimands, an imperfect representation distorts the target causal parameter by the product of two representation errors: one in the outcome regression and one in the bal…

Refreshment samples are the standard remedy for panel attrition, and the identification results behind them maintain that participation does not change measurement. We characterize what a refreshment sample identifies about panel conditioning, modelled as a deterministic monotone map at reinterview, when attrition is unrestricted. A candidate map is consistent with the data if and only if the retention-scaled distribution of the stayers' implied latent o…

The increasing volatility of electricity prices driven by renewable energy integration, market shocks, and regulatory changes has reinforced the need for forecasting methods that go beyond point predictions and accurately describe the full conditional price distribution. This paper applies the Generalised Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS) framework to forecast Spanish day-ahead electricity prices using hourly data from 2020 to 2024.…

In difference-in-differences (DiD), researchers may use pre-treatment trends to select a control group for which the parallel-trends assumption appears plausible, with the aim of estimating the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT). Our earlier paper,Nakano and Hoshino (2016), and the present paper jointly provide the first selective-inference approach to the ATT that explicitly accounts for this control selection. We generalize our exact Gaussia…

We study the anatomy of commodity risk by distinguishing micro, market-level, and economy-wide sources. We develop a two-stage "divide-and-conquer" framework that allows sensitivities to these risk sources to vary across commodities while treating economy-wide risk as latent. The first stage uses defactored instrumental-variable estimation to recover commodity-specific sensitivities to micro and market conditions. The second combines principal components…

In many statistical settings, the available data and maintained assumptions do not suffice to uniquely identify the model parameters of interest. In such cases, one can only identify sets which are guaranteed to contain the true parameters. These are often characterized through linear programs that optimize over models compatible with the observed data. These programs can be infinite-dimensional in the optimizer and the number of constraints. We provide…

This paper develops a framework for estimation and inference on the volumes of sets that are projections of critical function sets, focusing particularly on the convex body beneath the optimal receiver operating characteristic (ROC) surface. Specifically, we propose a volume calculation method that first uses an Aumann expectation representation and then applies Minkowski mixed volumes. Using this framework, we show that the population volume under the R…

Imputation-based causal estimation is typically viewed as relying exclusively on an outcome model, in contrast to augmented inverse-probability weighting, whose consistency is protected by fitting two nuisance models. This paper argues that this view can be misleading by highlighting a hidden dual weighting structure in least-squares sieve regression imputation. Although only outcome regressions are explicitly fitted, the resulting imputation estimator a…

We study estimation and inference for a partially identified parameter whose identified set depends on a first-stage nuisance parameter that must itself be estimated. Combining the criterion-function approach with the theory of Neyman-orthogonal moments that underlies double/debiased machine learning, we propose a two-step procedure: the point-identified nuisance is estimated by flexible machine-learning methods, and the set-identified target is recovere…

We answer the question posed in the title with a nonlinear mixed-frequency vector autoregression, estimated with Bayesian additive regression trees. The model combines monthly macro-financial variables with quarterly bank lending survey data, and identifies the dynamic responses from high-frequency policy surprises. Sign asymmetry dominates; a tightening produces monetary policy transmission mostly in line with the theoretical predictions, whereas easing…

Ignoring unobserved heterogeneity in duration models biases parameter estimates and invalidates inference, but testing for it is non-regular: the null hypothesis lies on the boundary of the parameter space and some parameters are unidentified under the null. These features render standard asymptotic theory inapplicable. This paper develops an EM test for unobserved heterogeneity in censored Weibull duration models, building on the EM approach of Li, Chen…

This paper characterizes the global minimum of the continuously updating generalized method of moments (CU-GMM) objective in linear instrumental variables models. We allow optimal weighting matrices under heteroskedasticity, autocorrelation, or clustering. We show that the objective is a ratio of polynomials. For one endogenous regressor, stationary points of CU-GMM objective function are real eigenvalues of a companion matrix. Comparing their objective…

Seasonal adjustment is fundamental to economic analysis, but uncertain because seasonal components are inherently latent. This article introduces a probabilistic model discovery method that decomposes a time series into seasonal and nonseasonal components. The method returns a posterior distribution over the structure and parameters of a seasonal component. In simulation studies, the method can improve point forecasts, interval predictions, and recovery…

Price stability remains a pillar in monetary policy practices and carries a special importance within monetary unions. Mainstream economics tried to leverage price stability using price indices and several metrics to shed light on specific dynamics and optimal macroeconomic levels. The wide availability of data led researchers to consider the study of systems using Random Matrix Theory, based on inner correlation patterns. This aims to enhance the multiv…

This manuscript is an English translation and extended version of a paper originally published in Japanese (2022). Driven by remarkable advances in remote sensing and big data processing, spatial technologies are increasingly leveraged in economic research. While satellite nighttime light intensity is widely recognized for tracking macroeconomic parameters - such as regional GDP, employment, and population - less attention has been paid to fine-grained s…

We test whether a multivariate vector X conforms to a specified distribution F, a problem in copula modelling and density forecasting. The Rosenblatt transform reduces it to a test of uniformity, but depends on an arbitrary coordinate ordering that strongly affects power under dependence. We study order randomization: applying the transform under many random orderings and merging the evidence with dependence-robust rules. Reordering conserves the total M…

We study a fixed-normalization class of symmetric bimatrix games generated by a common kernel and show that it admits efficient approximation despite exact symmetric-equilibrium computation remaining PPAD-hard. For every rational game in the class, a single auxiliary zero-sum saddle computation yields a rational symmetric \(1/5\)-approximate Nash equilibrium in polynomial time. We also give exact recognition and unique kernel recovery, and an exact polyn…

We propose a new $L_2$-type test for white noise which allows the dimension $p$ of the time series to either (i) be a fixed constant, or (ii) diverge with the sample size $n$. The proposed test statistic exhibits an interesting phase transition, following two different regimes of behavior: $p$ is fixed, and $p\rightarrow\infty$. Because identification of the operable regime is difficult, if not impossible in practice, we devise a novel adaptive bootstrap…

Market microstructure studies how trading rules turn orders into prices and allocations. Those rules have been rebuilt repeatedly: for floor traders, electronic limit order books and high-frequency trading, batch auctions and dark pools, blockchains run by automated market makers and block builders, and now AI agents that discover, pay for, and compete over resources. This survey traces that evolution through one question: can a market allocate scarce go…

Economic theory frequently implies linear inequality restrictions on parameters or functions of interest. A common way to impose such restrictions is to project an unrestricted estimator onto the feasible set. Projection estimators arise naturally from constrained least squares, instrumental variables, generalized method of moments, maximum likelihood, and related extremum procedures. When the sampling covariance, loss function, and projection criterion…

This paper develops a general two-point dependent wild bootstrap (DWB) for weakly dependent estimating equations. Its key feature is that the two-point marginal distribution and the latent serial dependence specification can be chosen separately. The construction combines a normalized two-point distribution with a stationary latent Gaussian process via a Gaussian copula transformation, includes dependent Rademacher and Mammen multipliers, and nests the c…

We develop a framework for identification, computation, and inference in econometric models with a linear-in-measures representation. These models express maintained restrictions as moment conditions linear in the joint probability measure of observed and latent inputs, and map that measure linearly to the distribution of outputs, even with nonlinear outcome equations. We construct an adversarial discrepancy function whose zeros characterize the identifi…

Instead of having a single "yes" or "no" result from a test of the global null hypothesis that a function is increasing, we propose a multiple testing procedure of the function's increasingness at several points. If the global null is rejected, then multiple testing provides more information about why. If the global null is not rejected, then multiple testing can provide stronger evidence in favor of increasingness, by rejecting null hypotheses that the…

Many models, such as fixed-effect models for panel or network data, are hard to estimate because they feature nuisance parameters that are both numerous and estimated imprecisely. This, in general, causes an incidental-parameter problem in the estimator of the parameters of interest. The problem can be alleviated by working with an estimating equation whose expectation is insensitive to the value of the nuisance parameters. We discuss and contrast three…

We study recursive-design wild bootstrap inference for dynamic panel data models with unobserved common factors estimated by Common Correlated Effects. In the large N,T setting, the bootstrap reproduces the biased limiting distribution in pure autoregressive models, but fails to capture all bias and factor-estimation variance components in models with additional regressors, particularly under weak exogeneity. We trace this failure to holding regressors f…

This paper studies risk-averse treatment allocation when individuals self-select into treatment based on unobserved characteristics. We develop a framework that combines the marginal treatment effect approach to endogenous selection with a general class of coherent risk measures that capture distributional preferences over welfare outcomes. We show that the planner's problem admits equivalent interpretations in terms of uncertainty aversion, distribution…

Online experiments must often be evaluated before long-term outcomes mature. Under rolling enrollment, these outcomes are observed only for early enrollees, while short-term surrogates are available for everyone. We compare seven estimators across eleven data-generating processes, spanning partial mediation, drift, outcome sparsity, and enrollment-time labeling, with up to $R = 2,000$ replications over more than 500 method-by-scenario cells. We find a sh…