Weekly highlights of recent papers and empirical findings from economics, health, policy, and the social sciences that apply causal methods and report meaningful results.
Few questions in economics are as politically charged or as methodologically demanding- as the labour-market effects of immigration. The challenge is identification: immigrants choose where to settle, often in booming regions, confounding any naive correlation between immigrant inflows and local wages. The studies below each exploit a credible source of exogenous variation a border opening, a sudden expulsion, a currency crisis, a refugee-dispersal rule, a historical settlement pattern to isolate causal effects. The results paint a more nuanced picture than the headlines.
This issue's methodological round-up gathers five recent papers that push the boundaries of what credible designs can identify relaxing the assumptions behind synthetic controls, extrapolating regression discontinuities, rescaling difference-in-differences, defeating unmeasured confounding, and taming high-dimensional panels.
This instalment of Recent Results surveys recent experimental and quasi-experimental evidence on cash transfer programmes, direct investments in human capital, and their long-run consequences in low- and middle-income countries. The papers span sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, and illustrate both the remarkable achievements and the remaining challenges of the experimental development economics literature.
This instalment of Recent Results surveys research at the intersection of financial economics and causal inference. Identifying causal effects in finance is notoriously difficult: firms sort endogenously into financial contracts, asset prices react simultaneously to the same shocks, and omitted variables confound naïve regressions. The papers below apply quasi-experimental identification RCTs, RD designs, IV, and judge leniency instruments to core questions in household finance, corporate finance, and the sociology of empirical methods.
Housing markets are among the most policy-contested domains in economics. Do rent controls protect tenants or restrict supply? Do planning regulations drive up prices? This issue surveys four causal studies that use well-identified designs to shed light on these questions.
This issue surveys four influential papers on gender gaps in earnings and employment, connecting them to the causal methods used for identification. Together they trace the causes of gender inequality from childbirth, to career dynamics in high-paying sectors, to structural features of labour markets.
Education is among the most studied topics in applied economics, yet the causal effects of specific educational investments— community college access, selective university attendance, credential completion— remain contested. This roundup highlights four recent studies that use credible quasi-experimental designs to estimate the causal returns to educational access and attainment.
Criminal justice is a domain where causal identification is both uniquely challenging and uniquely important. Incarceration, policing, and bail decisions are all correlated with pre-existing propensities toward crime and economic disadvantage, making selection bias pervasive. This roundup highlights four studies that use credible identification strategies to estimate causal effects in criminal justice settings.