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Crime and Mismeasured Punishment: Marginal Treatment Effect with Misclassification

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2026 108(1), 44-56 open access
I partially identify the marginal treatment effect (MTE) when the treatment is misclassified. I explore two restrictions, allowing for dependence between the instrument and the misclassification decision. If the signs of the propensity scores’ derivatives are equal, I identify the MTE sign. If those derivatives are similar, I bound the MTE. To illustrate, I analyze the impact of alternative sentences (fines and community service versus no punishment) on recidivism in Brazil, where court appeals processes generate misclassification. The estimated misclassification bias may be as large as 10% of the largest possible MTE, and the bounds contain the correctly estimated MTE.

Was Javert Right to Be Suspicious? Marginal Treatment Effects with Duration Outcomes

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2026
We identify the distributional and quantile marginal treatment effect functions when the outcome is right-censored. Our method requires a conditionally exogenous instrument and random censoring. We propose asymptotically consistent semi-parametric estimators and valid inferential procedures for the target functions . To illustrate, we evaluate the effect of alternative sentences (fines and community service vs. no punishment) on recidivism in Brazil. Our results highlight substantial treatment effect heterogeneity: we find that people whom most judges would punish take longer to recidivate, while people who would be punished only by strict judges recidivate at an earlier date than if they were not punished.