Weekly highlights of recent papers and empirical findings from economics, health, policy, and the social sciences that apply causal methods and report meaningful results.
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.
This issue's Results section highlights five papers at the intersection of platform economics, artificial intelligence, and rigorous causal identification—a rapidly growing frontier where the scale of digital firms enables quasi-experimental designs at unprecedented precision.
This issue's Results section highlights five recent papers at the frontier of causal identification in macroeconomics, covering fiscal multipliers, monetary policy transmission, and the LP-VAR equivalence literature.
This collection surveys four papers that use the marginal treatment effect (MTE) frame-work and related methods to answer policy questions about returns to education, schoolchoice, and the limits of instrumental variables. Together they illustrate how the MTE canproduce richer and more policy-relevant conclusions than standard IV estimates.
Environmental economics has produced some of the most creative identification strategiesin applied economics. The studies collected here span four decades but share a commonthread: each uses a credible source of quasi-experimental variation to isolate the causaleffect of pollution or environmental regulation on health and economic outcomes.