The econometrics arXiv, with citations

Should researchers adjust for covariates in randomized experiments, and if so, how? The literature offers three distinct prescriptions: do not adjust because randomization guarantees unbiasedness; adjust for outcome-prognostic covariates to improve precision; or adjust for covariates imbalanced between treatment arms. These competing prescriptions create confusion and uncertainty. We develop a unified framework for decision and practice. Given available…

When social assistance is scarce, should it prioritize households in greatest need or those expected to benefit most? Using panel data from the China Household Finance Survey, we distinguish allocation principles by combining predicted policy gains with entry into China's Minimum Living Standard Guarantee (Dibao). We estimate heterogeneous predicted gains in consumption and education and then recover the conditional priorities revealed by recipient selec…

Spatial treatments are interventions assigned to locations potentially distinct from those of the responding units. We study their optimal design under a general model in which a unit's response diminishes with distance to a treated site. Our estimand of interest is an “uncontaminated” effect equal to the average impact of a single intervention site over all hypothetical sites. We propose a novel design based on a Matérn point process which separates tre…

Existing causal-inference benchmarks for LLMs mostly score method descriptions or whether generated code runs, not whether the executed workflow recovers the target causal estimate. CausalVerify studies this verification problem for structured econometric causal-estimation workflows by separating realistic interpretation from verifiable computation. It pairs 259 published economics papers (reconstructed research question, data description, institutional…

Heavy-tailed and skewed outcomes are common in the randomized experiments and observational studies used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects, yet the mean-squared-error criterion that guides splitting in honest causal trees is sensitive to the extreme values they generate. Building on the causal forest framework (Athey and Imbens, 2016; Wager and Athey, 2018), we introduce the Median Squared Deviation (MSD) criterion, which replaces the leafwise…

A/B tests are standard in firm decision making. In the standard pipeline, experimental data is converted to a deployment decision by applying a t-test of the difference in means (the lift) and deploying the treatment if lift is positive and statistically significant. This common workflow answers the wrong question. We argue that firms need a decision rule for economic payoffs in the future deployment environment, not a test of equality in the experimenta…

We develop a filter for time series, defined at each time $t$ as the minimizer of a discounted convex combination of observed and expected losses. The filter can be estimated by simulation to an arbitrary level of accuracy in $O(1)$ flops at each time point $t$ and can be run for all values $t=1,...,T$ in parallel. These methods are applied to robustly compute a preaveraged price process from the more than 1.5 million trades made on a single financial as…

Estimating the first stage of an instrumental variables (IV) model with the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) requires choosing a dictionary of technical instruments and a penalty level. First-order asymptotic theory offers no guidance on these choices, as any consistent implementation yields a structural parameter estimator with the same limiting distribution. In finite samples, however, these choices can have a substantial impact…

Sign restrictions on the slopes of supply and demand curves are often used to identify historical decompositions in structural vector autoregressions. I show that the identifying power of these restrictions depends on both reduced-form parameters and realised forecast errors. Consequently, unlike many other structural objects, the strength of identification cannot be assessed from reduced-form parameters alone. Empirically, identified sets for historical…

Heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian (HANK) models characterize how entire cross-sectional distributions respond to structural shocks. Traditional representative-agent models are routinely disciplined by impulse responses from aggregate vector autoregressions (VARs). HANK models have no comparable established empirical benchmark because they make predictions not only about aggregates, but also about distributions of micro-level data. We propose a Bayesian b…

This paper develops fixed-smoothing (fixed-b, fixed-K) inference methods for time-series quantile regression that are robust to heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation. Our approach is uniformly valid over quantile levels and accounts for dependence both over time and across quantiles. It enables the construction of uniform confidence bands, Wald, and Sup-t tests for joint hypotheses, and tests of shape restrictions, providing a unified framework for asse…

We extend the clustered connectedness framework of Buchwalter, Diebold and Yilmaz (2026) in two complementary directions that improve the robustness and interpretability of cross-cluster connectedness. First, we develop a diagnostic for residual ordering sensitivity by characterizing the distribution of cluster-level net connectedness across all admissible identification orderings and, in particular, by pairing first- and last-position orderings while ho…

This paper studies the effects of p-hacking on the bias of published estimates when papers with statistically significant results are selectively published. We show that fast p-hacking---actions that lead to large changes in p-values---always exacerbates the bias from selective publication. On the other hand, slow p-hacking---actions that lead to small changes in p-values---exacerbates bias when selection is weak, but mitigates it when selection is stron…

Measuring the intergenerational transmission of lifetime economic status is complicated by researchers often only observing snapshots of income at specific ages. Consequently, standard practice estimates intergenerational mobility using income averages, introducing life-cycle bias that compromises reliability and comparability across studies, time, and place. I develop a missing data framework that exploits available income data and observable characteri…

This paper analyzes the implementation of blockchain-based integrity mechanisms in Greek Fiscal Electronic Mechanisms (FEMs) and the central tax information system eSEND. The study examines the cryptographic architecture of fiscal devices, including Electronic Cash Registers, Fiscal Printers, Fiscal Signing Machines, and FEMAS devices, which implement double or triple hash-chain structures to ensure transaction immutability. The transmission protocol bet…

When natural disasters strike, individuals, communities, and even entire countries can suffer. Researchers have studied the impacts of disasters on various factors of interest, from mental health, to poverty, to economic activity. However, the impact of disasters on the nonprofit sector is understudied despite the nonprofit sector's perhaps surprising role in local or national economies as well as its role in disaster response and recovery. Thus, we stud…

We give an exact randomization-based confidence set for the average treatment effect (ATE) in matched-pair studies with a binary outcome, requiring neither monotonicity nor any distributional assumption beyond the within-pair coin flip. At its core is an analytic solution to the worst-case allocation of attributable effects: two binomial-symmetry lemmas identify the pattern hardest to reject as a single boundary corner, so testing null hypotheses needs n…

In the presence of interference, where the treatment assigned to one unit can affect the outcomes of others, many causal estimands depend on the treatment-assignment policy under which the experiment is conducted. This policy dependence creates a fundamental challenge for off-policy estimation, where the goal is to estimate causal quantities under a hypothetical intervention policy different from the one used to collect data. We study this problem of off…

We establish the consistency and asymptotic normality of a two-step estimator of conditional expectiles in the context of conditional scale models. We first estimate the conditional variance parameters by quasi-maximum likelihood and then compute the unconditional expectile of the innovations using the empirical distribution of the standardized residuals. We show how replacing true innovations with standardized residuals affects the asymptotic variances…

To study a scalar parameter, a researcher may consider multiple research designs. Based on the evidence across designs, the researcher may wish to formulate a headline estimate of the parameter. I examine how to choose this headline when it is unclear which design is most appropriate for studying the parameter. I model this setting by assuming that (i) exactly one of the designs is valid for the parameter and (ii) the researcher has ambiguity about which…

Inference in linear regression commonly treats OLS residuals as proxies for unobserved errors. This approximation can fail when the regression projection is nonlocal relative to the error-dependence structure. Residualization then shifts covariance information across observations and clusters, while conventional heteroskedasticity-consistent (HC) and cluster-robust variance estimators (CRVE) retain only diagonal or within-cluster residual moments and may…

Policies with a common objective and implementation date may differ in details or context. We distinguish the aggregate average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) from sub-aggregate ATTs defined by implementation cohort, jurisdiction, period, or policy type. UN-DID and DID-INT, two DiD estimators that construct jurisdiction-by-time effects, estimate these ATTs under parallel-trends conditions matched to the aggregation. In CPS placebo-law simulations,…

Market efficiency relies fundamentally on stable liquidity. Consequently, forecasting liquidity dynamics is a priority for both investors and regulators. We introduce a new tail-risk metric, Illiquidity-at-Risk (IlliQaR), designed to quantify the magnitude of extreme liquidity dry-ups. Relying upon the realized Amihud (a precise illiquidity measurement derived from high-frequency data as the ratio of realized volatility to trading volume) we assess the p…

In a network with ramp-limited generators and inaccurate net-demand forecasts, practical rolling-window dispatch can drive locational marginal prices (LMPs) below generators' bid-in offers. In such cases, out-of-market (OOM) settlements are used to compensate generators and maintain dispatch-following incentives, but OOM can have negative consequences, including nontransparent real-time price signals, discriminatory compensation, and incentives for untru…

We propose the first manipulation test designed for boundary discontinuity designs (BDDs) with general boundary shapes. A BDD is a multidimensional extension of the regression discontinuity design (RDD) in which treatment assignment is determined by whether the multidimensional running variable crosses a lower-dimensional boundary set. The test avoids multivariate density estimation and builds on the observation that, in the absence of manipulation, obse…

We study identification and estimation of moments of random coefficients in short linear panels, allowing the number of heterogeneous coefficients to exceed the number of equations observed for each unit. Under moment homogeneity, different regressor histories impose restrictions on the same moment vector. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for these restrictions to identify moments of a given order, stated in terms of the row spaces generated b…

When do text embeddings work as inputs to empirical analysis? Their use rests on an assumption: that we can trade text for its low-dimensional embedding, and lose little in doing so. I make that assumption precise under a generative model in which documents are mixtures of latent topics. I study two uses---clustering units in embedding space and controlling for high-dimensional text. A cluster of embeddings is a set of documents with similar topic mixtur…

Foundation models promise accurate forecasts with little or no task-specific training, but whether they can replace models designed specifically for electricity price forecasting remains unclear. We compare nine variants from five foundation model families, evaluated in zero-shot mode, with two state-of-the-art electricity price forecasting benchmarks in Germany, Poland, and Spain over 2021-2025. Their performance is assessed in terms of point and probab…

Stablecoins, typically pegged to fiat currencies, cannot achieve true stability because they inherit fluctuations in the underlying unit of account. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a stablecoin pegged to the Maximum Likelihood Value (MLV), a newly defined unit of account derived as the most probable configuration of latent real-value movements that explains observed nominal-value (price) changes. Grounded in inferential statistics and modern po…

Industrial recommenders give new content initial views through budgeted exploration, then use early performance to decide further delivery. On many short-video platforms, exploration is the primary way new videos reach viewers. Viewer-side tests measure consumption; the published budget objectives we review omit creator response. We analyze four experiments on a major short-video platform. An eight-month creator ablation finds production exploration rais…

In this paper, we study causal non-causal state space models to model time series characterised by a local explosive increase followed by a sharp decrease such as stock prices. To motivate the use of causal non-causal state space models, we show that the causal non-causal convolution autoregressive model introduced by Gourieroux and Zakoian (2017) can be consistent with the rational expectations stock price model. As in a causal state space model, a cent…

We present a suite of R packages for macroeconomic forecasting that leverages advanced Bayesian, structural, multivariate, dynamic, hierarchical, non-linear, and non-Gaussian models. The suite enables both structural and predictive analyses, and is adapted to time series data across various types, dimensions, and sampling frequencies. Each additional feature increases computational complexity. To address this challenge, our software design incorporates a…

We study identification of two-way unobserved heterogeneity in the nonparametric panel regression $G_{it}=g(α_i,γ_t)+\varepsilon_{it}$, where identification of the latent types reduces to constructing identified, injective proxies for them. To this end we consider the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the bivariate regression function $g(α,γ)$ on a product domain $Ω_α\timesΩ_γ$, whose left singular functions ${u_r}$ serve as proxies for the unobserve…

Recent work encourages political scientists to move from post-only toward within-subject designs for improved precision from repeated measurements. We formalize a potential-outcomes framework for two-period within-subject designs that allows for unequal allocation and heterogeneous treatment and carryover effects. We characterize the pooled estimator and evaluate the carryover test used to justify pooling. We find: first, pooling identifies the average t…

Which visual choices make a post perform better? A growing literature answers this question with pooled coefficients estimated across many creators, which platforms translate into creative recommendations. We show that these coefficients blend two distinct patterns that can point in opposite directions for the same attribute. The first, audience preference, arises because creators who favor a style attract differently composed audiences, so their posts p…

We develop a novel method of inference for network-dependent high-dimensional random vectors. Dependence is characterized via a functional dependence measure based on graph distance, allowing the approximation theory to capture the interaction between the decay of dependence and the growth of network neighborhoods. We establish Gaussian approximation results for the maximum norm under finite-moment and sub-Weibull conditions, providing explicit condition…

In this study, we construct the first orthogonal basis for additively consistent subspace in pairwise comparisons theory. This construction is based on our representation of additively consistent best approximations of skew-symmetric matrices with respect to a tensor basis having minimal support. The orthogonal basis establishes the logarithmic consistent projection for the orthogonal windowing of pairwise comparisons matrices. It is compared with the wi…

Many empirical investigations of long-run relations are based on cross-section regressions in averaged or long differenced data that effectively have the time dimension of a $T\times N$ panel compressed. We analyze a class of time-compressed I(1) data and show that they have magnified variability stemming from the fact that the cross-section variance of a non-stationary panel `fans out' with time. Cross-section regressions in time compressed data can pot…

This paper proposes a nonparametric Bayesian inference framework for partially identified discrete response models. The key observation is that these models map a reduced-form conditional choice probability to an identified set. Consequently, nonparametric Bayesian inference for the conditional probability mass function leads to Bayesian inference for the identified set. The inference framework nests conditional moment inequalities and linear systems wit…

This paper develops a new econometric framework to identify and estimate policy-relevant causal effects in contexts with endogenous selection into treatment and spillovers within single large networks or spatial settings. Conventional causal inference methods relying on either unconfoundedness or no-interference assumptions are generally inadequate in these scenarios. We introduce a Spillover Roy model that jointly models endogenous treatment selection a…