Time-Varying Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Event Studies

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Botosaru, Irene, Liu, Laura
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Botosaru, Irene
Liu, Laura
author_facet Botosaru, Irene
Liu, Laura
contents This paper examines the identification and estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects in event studies, emphasizing the importance of both lagged dependent variables and treatment effect heterogeneity. We show that omitting lagged dependent variables can induce omitted variable bias in the estimated time-varying treatment effects. We develop a novel semiparametric approach based on a short-T dynamic linear panel model with correlated random coefficients, where the time-varying heterogeneous treatment effects can be modeled by a time-series process to reduce dimensionality. We construct a two-step estimator employing quasi-maximum likelihood for common parameters and empirical Bayes for the heterogeneous treatment effects. The procedure is flexible, easy to implement, and achieves ratio optimality asymptotically. Our results also provide insights into common assumptions in the event study literature, such as no anticipation, homogeneous treatment effects across treatment timing cohorts, and state dependence structure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13698
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Time-Varying Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Event Studies
Botosaru, Irene
Liu, Laura
Econometrics
This paper examines the identification and estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects in event studies, emphasizing the importance of both lagged dependent variables and treatment effect heterogeneity. We show that omitting lagged dependent variables can induce omitted variable bias in the estimated time-varying treatment effects. We develop a novel semiparametric approach based on a short-T dynamic linear panel model with correlated random coefficients, where the time-varying heterogeneous treatment effects can be modeled by a time-series process to reduce dimensionality. We construct a two-step estimator employing quasi-maximum likelihood for common parameters and empirical Bayes for the heterogeneous treatment effects. The procedure is flexible, easy to implement, and achieves ratio optimality asymptotically. Our results also provide insights into common assumptions in the event study literature, such as no anticipation, homogeneous treatment effects across treatment timing cohorts, and state dependence structure.
title Time-Varying Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Event Studies
topic Econometrics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13698