Working Papers

Delivering Education to the Underserved through a Public-Private Partnership Program in Pakistan

Working Papers

Revise and resubmit, Review of Economics and Statistics NBER Working Paper W23870. Link to paper: [PDF] Abstract: Governments are increasingly partnering with the private sector to improve the delivery of education. We contribute to this literature by evaluating a program that randomly assigned newly-created private schools to underserved villages in Pakistan. Private operators were given a […]

Moment Forests

Working Papers

We propose a new methodology, moment forests, that allows parameters in a broad class of moment-based models to vary across groups of observations on the basis of observable characteristics. Leveraging a generalization of classification trees, the estimator first assigns observations to disjoint subgroups sharing common parameters, and then estimates an empirical model within each group. We prove the uniform consistency of this estimator and show that standard rates of convergence apply to the second stage estimates under weak regularity conditions. We showcase our approach by estimating heterogeneous treatment effects in a regression discontinuity design in a development setting.