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A Discrimination Report Card

American Economic Review 2024 114(8), 2472-2525
We develop an empirical Bayes ranking procedure that assigns ordinal grades to noisy measurements, balancing the information content of the assigned grades against the expected frequency of ranking errors. Applying the method to a massive correspondence experiment, we grade the race and gender contact gaps of 97 US employers, the identities of which we disclose for the first time. The grades are presented alongside measures of uncertainty about each firm’s contact gap in an accessible report card that is easily adaptable to other settings where ranks and levels are of simultaneous interest.

On Recoding Ordered Treatments as Binary Indicators

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2024
Researchers using instrumental variables to investigate ordered treatments often recode treatment into an indicator for any exposure. We investigate this estimand under the assumption that the instruments shift compliers from no treatment to some but not from some treatment to more. We show that when there are extensive margin compliers only (EMCO) this estimand captures a weighted average of treatment effects that can be partially unbundled into each complier group's potential outcome means. We also establish an equivalence between EMCO and a two-factor selection model and apply our results to study treatment heterogeneity in the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.

The Effects of Combat Deployments on Veterans’ Outcomes

Journal of Political Economy 2024 132(8), 2830-2879
As millions of soldiers deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, Veteran Affairs Disability Compensation payments quadrupled and the veteran suicide rate rose rapidly. We estimate the causal contribution of combat deployments to declining veteran well-being. Deployments increase injuries, combat deaths, and disability compensation, but we find limited effects on suicide, deaths of despair, financial health, incarceration, or education. Our estimates suggest that deployment cannot explain either the recent rise in disability payments, which is more likely driven by policy changes, or the surge in noncombat deaths, which is better explained by shifts in observable characteristics of soldiers.