The Review of Economic Studies is one of the core journals in economics. It is essential reading for economists, consistently ranking among the top five journals.

Linear instrumental variable estimators, such as two-stage least squares (TSLS), are commonly interpreted as estimating non-negatively weighted averages of causal effects, referred to as local average treatment effects (LATEs). We examine whether the LATE interpretation actually applies to the types of TSLS specifications that are used in practice. We show that if the specification includes covariates—which most empirical work does—then the LATE interpretation does not apply in general.

Economists are often interested in the mechanisms by which a treatment affects an outcome. We develop tests for the “sharp null of full mediation” that a treatment D affects an outcome Y only through a particular mechanism (or set of mechanisms) M. Our approach exploits connections between mediation analysis and the econometric literature on testing instrument validity.

This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify variation in political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not necessarily reflect political pressure, I develop a narrative identification strategy based on President Nixon’s pressure on Fed Chair Burns. I exploit this narrative through restrictions on a structural vector autoregression that includes the President-Fed interaction data.

This paper develops a new framework for understanding when and how migrants shape culture, applying it to the Confederate diaspora—a small migrant group that left a large cultural imprint. Southern Whites that migrated after the Civil War played a pivotal role in spreading Confederate symbols and racial norms across the United States by the early 20th century.

Multiple hypothesis testing practices vary widely, without consensus on which are appropriate when. This paper provides an economic foundation for these practices designed to capture leading examples, such as regulatory approval on the basis of clinical trials. MHT adjustments are appropriate in our framework to the extent that research costs are invariant to the number of hypotheses.

We propose a simple and general model of experimentation in which reaching untried levels of a stock variable may, after a stochastic delay, lead to a catastrophe. Hence, at any point in time a catastrophe might well be under way, due to past experiments. We show how to measure this legacy of the past from prior beliefs and the chronicle of stock levels.