arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 8, 2026 — 12:26:36 EST
What happens to a party's vote share when it nominates a woman for executive office? The evidence on female candidates is dominated by legislative races and by designs that pool parties and periods into a single average effect, which is typically null. This paper builds a new county-level panel of US gubernatorial elections - 578...
Understanding the propagation of extreme events is important in many economic and environmental applications, yet most econometric methods for causal inference focus on average effects rather than tail behavior. This paper studies the identification of causal relations in extremes and derives resulting estimators and their asymptotic...
Spatial autoregressive inference is typically conditional on the spatial weights matrix, W, even though the underlying interaction structure is often unknown and empirical conclusions can be sensitive to its specification. This paper develops double/debiased machine learning inference for low-dimensional SAR parameters when the...
Search rankings are valuable because human attention is scarce and sequential. Higher-placed alternatives are easier to find, so they are examined and bought more often. Consumers are now delegating search to AI agents that can ingest an entire results page at once. Randomizing the order of one hundred hotel listings across 5,000 AI...
A team-contest designer values output rather than expenditure; nonlinear conversion makes the distinction consequential. We study two non-pecuniary instruments in majority-rule contests decided by pairwise all-pay battles with private abilities: disclosing resolved outcomes and splitting the battle schedule into finer blocks. Neither...
During clinical trials evaluating a drug's effect on a survival endpoint, intermediate events often occur in addition to the primary event. The treatment can exert its effect on the primary endpoint along multiple pathways through intermediate events. Assumptions for identifying mediation effects, such as sequential ignorability in...
This paper studies the nonparametric identification and estimation of additively separable triangular models with continuous endogenous and instrumental variables, allowing for a nonseparable first-stage equation. Under the independence of instrumental variables and unobservables, we show that the outcome function possesses a...
We study a dynamic spatial panel model with observed regressors, interactive effects, and contemporaneous and lagged dependence in a large-$N$, fixed-$T$ framework. The spatial model constitutes an $N$-dimensional simultaneous-equations system. In this $N$-equation view, the interactive effects introduce $N$ unit-specific loading...
Consider the problem of designing a revenue-optimal auction mechanism when two heterogeneous items are sold to a single buyer having independent valuations over the items. The distributions of the buyer's valuation for the items are assumed to have densities that are positive, nondecreasing, and continuously differentiable on their...
This paper studies quantile treatment and spillover effects in network experiments. Average spillover effects reveal how treating a unit's neighbors affects its outcome on average, but mask the heterogeneity of these effects across the outcome distribution. We define structural quantile effects that compare outcome quantiles between...
We characterize the communication networks that ensure consensus in rational social learning under the sure-thing principle. A network ensures consensus if and only if it is pseudo-reciprocal, a property under which reciprocity may fail between individuals but holds at a coarser group level. Prior work has assumed message exchange to...
Asymptotic normality approximations often fail to hold for extremum estimators when the true value of the parameter is at or close to the boundary of a parameter space. I analyze and develop tests using a quasi-unconstrained estimator, which is asymptotically normal even when the true parameter vector is near or at the boundary. These...
In 2025, bilateral foreign aid was reduced by 23%, affecting more than 130 aid recipient countries. We assess whether debt service relief or remittance increases can match the USD 26 billion in aid losses. Using a network-shock model calibrated to bilateral donors' individual cuts, we estimate recipient-country aid losses and evaluate...
In online product search, returned alternatives often look alike. We investigate when a product's visual separation from its closest look-alike in a returned set increases its choice probability. We introduce two occasion-level constructs: contextual visual distinctiveness (image distance from the nearest similar alternative in the...
Rejection sampling requires a proposal that dominates the target by a known constant, generally unavailable for non-Gaussian state space models. We construct such a proposal for the latent state path, yielding independent exact smoothing draws and an unbiased likelihood estimator whose relative variance is at most $1/p-1$ per draw at...
High-resolution ALMA observations indicate that planet formation is already well underway in the earliest stages of disc evolution, when discs are typically massive enough to be regulated by gravitational instability (GI). In this regime, the interplay between dust dynamics and GI may enable rapid core formation, but the conditions...
We study a one-dimensional scalar model for an effective-mass quasiparticle field coupled to a continuum of two-level atoms with at most one excitation present. We prove a general theorem on the existence of bound states under sign-definite spatially localized perturbations of constant atomic density and analyze the bound states for...
Strong gravitational lensing contains key information about cosmic acceleration. Modern and next-generation galaxy imaging surveys are expected to provide high-quality data on $\mathcal{O}(10^5)$ galaxy-galaxy lensing systems. The plethora and complexity of the data are likely to present computational challenges for parameter...
Conventional full counting statistics assigns commuting phases to integrated stochastic currents and therefore resolves net transport but not, in general, the temporal ordering of events associated with different cycles. We introduce a non-Abelian counting construction in which crossings of two fundamental cycles rotate an auxiliary...
Pointing jitter can significantly degrade the performance of intersatellite optical communication links. This work investigates diffractive optical beam shaping as a means of generating super-Gaussian profiles with reduced sensitivity to transmitter misalignment. Phase screens are designed using a Gerchberg--Saxton phase-retrieval...
The Euler product of the Riemann zeta function is the partition function of a free bosonic gas whose mode energies are the logarithms of the primes. We show that this arithmetic gas, combined with the assumption that the entropy--geometry correspondence holds, leads to a quantum-corrected black-hole metric. The prime gas is a Hagedorn...
Massive stars characteristically form in clustered environments. Characterising young massive 'protoclusters' is therefore crucial to constraining the mechanism(s) of massive star formation, and of the assembly of stellar clusters. We present 1.3 mm continuum results from the ALMA EGO-10 imaging survey, targeting ten Spitzer GLIMPSE...
We present a methodology to decouple propagation effects, specifically scattering and dispersion, from the intrinsic spectro-temporal properties of repeating Fast Radio Bursts. Utilizing the Triggered Relativistic Dynamical Model, and assuming superradiance as the emission mechanism, we generate simulated sub-bursts and inject...
Extensions of the Standard Model by a $U(1)_{X}$ gauge symmetry predict a new $Z'$ boson, whose mass is severely constrained by high-mass dilepton resonance searches at the LHC. We show that these bounds can be relaxed by generalizing the chiral $(B-L)$ charge assignment while preserving gauge anomaly cancellation. The resulting...
Run-and-tumble particles (RTPs) are canonically modeled with uniform reorientation probabilities, an assumption that breaks down for many biological microswimmers. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of RTPs with arbitrary non-uniform tumble distributions. By deriving an exact Doi-Peliti field theory, we explicitly calculate a...