arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 5, 2026 — 02:28:21 EST
In the empirical sciences, significance thresholds often determine whether findings are treated as evidence of an effect. This paper studies how likely findings that just meet conventional significance thresholds are to remain significant in replications of the same sample size. To answer this question, we estimate the expected...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
We study an experiment with 8.5 million users on Netflix's recommender system to measure how improvements in recommendation technology affect the set of products that get consumed. Improvements increase total consumption and users' reliance on recommendations while diffusing recommendations and consumption away from the most popular...
Rising interest rates can expose life insurers to surrender risk by reducing the market value of their assets and raising policyholders' outside returns. This paper develops a minimal model of an insurance-specific run mechanism in which strategic interaction arises because early surrenders can deplete the asset pool backing...
We study causal moderation when treatment assignment is randomized but the moderator is not. We combine the parallel estimation framework with front-door adjustment to identify an average mediated treatment moderation effect. We apply this approach to 165 municipal assembly elections in Tokyo (1987-2023), where pamphlet positions are...
We study, theoretically and experimentally, how transparency about students' priorities and admission chances shapes their incentives to acquire information about their own preferences in school choice and college admissions. In the model, uninformed students choose schools based on a common prior. When they learn their own...
Firms perform online experiments with multi-armed bandits to personalize what consumers are shown while balancing exploration and exploitation. However, third-parties can infer consumers' underlying segments from observing which banners, ads, or recommendations consumers receive. To control this inference, we propose a privacy risk...
Objective functions (goodness criteria which have to be optimized) that are considered, for instance, in cluster analysis, factor analysis, (linear) structural equation modeling, (linear) regression, multidimensional scaling, choice theory, and utility theory, must be {\em adequate}, i.e. carefully adapted to the structure of the...
Firms perform online experiments with multi-armed bandits to personalize what consumers are shown while balancing exploration and exploitation. However, third-parties can infer consumers' underlying segments from observing which banners, ads, or recommendations consumers receive. To control this inference, we propose a privacy risk...
We study the comparison of binary statistical experiments in large samples where information is acquired sequentially and the number of observations can depend on realized evidence. We introduce two orders. Stopping dominance compares experiments by their ability to reproduce the outcomes of arbitrary stopping policies, while decision...
Are simple delegation rules optimal under ambiguity? We study delegation when the principal knows the mean, but not the distribution, of the agent's private information. In a quadratic constant-bias environment, the robustly optimal randomized mechanism is a random cap: the principal draws and reveals an upper bound below which the...
A principal screens an agent whose technology has a minimum efficient scale, so the Spence-Mirrlees condition fails along a monotone dividing curve: the locus at which every type values marginal output equally. For the class in which this curve and the relaxed solution are both strictly monotone, the optimal contract obeys a...
I study why some groups---polities and organizations alike---sustain independent judgment while others fall into conformity traps. Social approval can suppress not only the expression of independent judgment but also the upstream practice that keeps such judgment available: maintaining judgment generates visible questioning, and...
The Plurality rule is vulnerable to vote splitting between similar alternatives. Defying conventional wisdom, we characterize the Plurality rule through a specific type of clone independence condition. We further introduce the notion of a one-parameter family of $p$-Clone Resistance ($p$-CR), and examine the property within the class...
We study coalitional manipulation of interval-valued median correspondences on the single-peaked domain. Under the pessimistic extension, group strategy-proofness rules out any genuinely set-valued choice. Under the optimistic and best--worst extensions, by contrast, group strategy-proofness characterizes target set correspondences....