Estimating Treatment Effects Under Bounded Heterogeneity

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kwon, Soonwoo, Sun, Liyang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Kwon, Soonwoo
Sun, Liyang
author_facet Kwon, Soonwoo
Sun, Liyang
contents Specifications that impose constant treatment effects are common but biased, while fully flexible alternatives can be imprecise or infeasible. Under a bound on treatment effect heterogeneity, we propose a generalized ridge estimator, $\texttt{regulaTE}$, that yields heterogeneity-aware confidence intervals (CIs). The ridge penalty is chosen to optimally trade off worst-case bias and variance in a Gaussian homoskedastic setting; the resulting CIs remain tight more generally and are valid even under lack of overlap. Varying the bound enables sensitivity analysis to departures from constant effects, which we illustrate in leading empirical applications of unconfoundedness and staggered adoption designs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_05454
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Estimating Treatment Effects Under Bounded Heterogeneity
Kwon, Soonwoo
Sun, Liyang
Econometrics
Methodology
Specifications that impose constant treatment effects are common but biased, while fully flexible alternatives can be imprecise or infeasible. Under a bound on treatment effect heterogeneity, we propose a generalized ridge estimator, $\texttt{regulaTE}$, that yields heterogeneity-aware confidence intervals (CIs). The ridge penalty is chosen to optimally trade off worst-case bias and variance in a Gaussian homoskedastic setting; the resulting CIs remain tight more generally and are valid even under lack of overlap. Varying the bound enables sensitivity analysis to departures from constant effects, which we illustrate in leading empirical applications of unconfoundedness and staggered adoption designs.
title Estimating Treatment Effects Under Bounded Heterogeneity
topic Econometrics
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05454