When searching for populations of rare and/or weak signals in noisy data, it is common to use a detection threshold to remove marginal events which are unlikely to be the signals of interest; or a detector might have limited sensitivity, causing it to not detect some of the population. In both cases a selection of data has occurred, which can potentially bias any inferences drawn from the remai...

This article investigates the causal effects of neighborhood on high school dropping out and teenage pregnancy within a counterfactual framework. It shows that when two groups of children, identical at age 10 on observed factors, experience different neighborhoods during adolescence, those in high-poverty neighborhoods are more likely to drop out of high school and have a teenage pregnancy than...

Audit fee studies often find large (Big 5) audit firms earn significantly higher fees than small (non-Big 5) firms, but they treat auditor choice as exogenous. In contrast, this paper takes into account that companies are not randomly assigned to audit firms. We find the effects of auditor selection bias on audit fees are statistically and economically significant. Consistent with the predictio...

When there is a rare disease in a population, it is inefficient to take a random sample to estimate a parameter. Instead one takes a random sample of all nuclear families with the disease by ascertaining at least one sibling (proband) of each family. In these studies, an estimate of the proportion of siblings with the disease will be inflated. Sometimes the situation is even worse; the investig...

objectives: nouns and verbs are the central conceptual linguistic units of language acquisition in all human languages. while the noun-bias hypothesis claims that nouns have a privilege in children’s lexical development across languages, studies on mandarin and korean and other languages have challenged this view. more recent cross-linguistic naming studies on children in german, turkish, engli...

Previous research has shown that infants can acquire a “shape bias” in word learning when presented with labels that are perfectly correlated with object shape. However, little research examines whether children can acquire a non-shape word learning bias. Research on inducing this bias can help inform the origins of the shape bias. In our experiment, 3 year-old children successfully acquired a ...