A Toolkit for the Study of Treatment-Effect Discontinuities

Alessandro Baldi Antognini and Paolo Verme

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper provides a toolkit for the study of distributional treatment effects (DTEs) focused on treatment-effect discontinuities defined as points where marginal distributional effects change sign. Building on the Treatment Effects Curve (TEC, Verme, 2010), the paper makes three contributions. First, we propose a methodological framework comprising a Horizontal Discontinuity Analysis (HDA) comparing groups in regions of opposite-signed effects using causal forests, and a Vertical Discontinuity Analysis (VDA) examining sign-switch points. Second, we adapt crossing-point asymptotics to locate where a TEC crosses zero and to test the non-tangentiality of its local slope with a bias-corrected Wald statistic. Third, we illustrate the full workflow on synthetic data and add a diagnostic application to Mexico's PROGRESA data. The paper shows how these contributions complement and expand existing instruments for DTE analyses.

Date: 2026-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.28017 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2606.28017

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().