Linear Estimation of Global Average Treatment Effects

Stefan Faridani and Paul Niehaus

No 33319, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the problem of estimating the average causal effect of treating every member of a population, as opposed to none, using an experiment that treats only some. We consider settings where spillovers have global support and decay slowly with (a generalized notion of) distance. We derive the minimax rate over both estimators and designs, and show that it increases with the spatial rate of spillover decay. Estimators based on OLS regressions like those used to analyze recent large-scale experiments are consistent (though only after de-weighting), achieve the minimax rate when the DGP is linear, and converge faster than IPW-based alternatives when treatment clusters are small, providing one justification for OLS's ubiquity. When the DGP is nonlinear they remain consistent but converge slowly. We further address inference and bandwidth selection. Applied to the cash transfer experiment studied by Egger et al (2022) these methods yield a 20% larger estimated effect on consumption.

JEL-codes: C01 C9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
Note: DEV TWP
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33319.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:33319

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33319
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().