We study treatment-effect estimation using panel data. The treatment may be nonbinary, nonabsorbing, and the outcome may be affected by treatment lags. We make a parallel-trends assumption and propose event-study estimators of the effect of being exposed to a weakly higher treatment dose for ℓ periods. We also propose normalized estimators that estimate a weighted average of the effects of the current treatment and its lags. We also analyze commonly used two-way, fixed-effects regressions. Unlike our estimators, they can be biased in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects. A local-projection version of those regressions is biased even with homogeneous effects.

This paper revisits the relationship between federal debt and interest rates in the U.S. A common approach is to regress long-term forward interest rates on long-term projections of federal debt. We show that issues regarding nonstationarity have become more pronounced over the last 20 years, significantly biasing recent estimates. Estimating the model in first differences rather than in levels addresses these concerns. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio raises the 5-year-ahead, 5-year Treasury rate by about 3 basis points. Roughly half of the interest rate response is driven by a higher nominal term premium.

Nonprofit organizations rely on donations from large competitive marketplaces to provide key social service goods. Most research focuses on competition in output markets without considering philanthropic markets where nonprofits make decisions about how much effort to put into fundraising. We develop and estimate a model that highlights the strategic nature of fundraising, showing that rival NP’s fundraising responses can be strategic complements or substitutes. We find evidence of strategic substitutes. NPs demonstrate nontrivial strategic responses to rival’s fundraising and, in totality, the across sector impacts are important to consider. Counterfactual exercises show that reducing competition decreases equilibrium fundraising levels.

Regulators of new products confront a trade-off between speeding a product to market and collecting additional product quality information. The FDA's Breakthrough Therapy Designation (BTD) provides an opportunity to understand if regulators can use new policy to innovate around this trade-off. We find that the BTD program shortened clinical development times by 23% and did not affect the ex post safety profile of drugs with the designation. The BTD program had the greatest impact on less experienced firms and reduced clinical trial design complexity. The results suggest that targeted regulatory innovation can shorten R&D periods without compromising product quality.