Balancing External vs. Internal Validity: An Application of Causal Forest in Finance

The authors thank Anat Admati, Josh Angrist, Shai Bernstein, Alex Butler, Zhaojing Chen, Sergey Chernenko, Tony Cookson (discussant), David Denis, Isil Erel, Miguel Ferreira, Oleg Gredil, Selin Gulen, Manasa Gopal, Camille Hebert, Steven Jens, Nishad Kapadia, Weiling Liu, Michelle Lowry, Anya Nakhmurina, Greg Nini (discussant), Ryan Peters, Mitchell Petersen (discussant), Robert Prilmeier, Matthew Ringgenberg (discussant), James Reeder, Jin Xu, Irene Yi, Morad Zekhnini, and seminar participants at Tulane University, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), University of Massachusetts (Boston), Wayne State University, the New Technologies in Finance Conference (Columbia Business School), the University of Iowa, Syracuse University, the Northeastern University Finance Conference 2020, the 2020 Texas A&M Young Scholars in Finance Conference, the 2022 American Finance Association Conference, and the Craig Holden Memorial Conference at Indiana University. This research was supported in part using high-performance computing (HPC) resources and services provided by Technology Services at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Syracuse University’s OrangeGrid.