From Local to Global: External Validity in a Fertility Natural Experiment

Rajeev Dehejia, Cristian Pop-Eleches and Cyrus Samii

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We study issues related to external validity for treatment effects using over 100 replications of the Angrist and Evans (1998) natural experiment on the effects of sibling sex composition on fertility and labor supply. The replications are based on census data from around the world going back to 1960. We decompose sources of error in predicting treatment effects in external contexts in terms of macro and micro sources of variation. In our empirical setting, we find that macro covariates dominate over micro covariates for reducing errors in predicting treatments, an issue that past studies of external validity have been unable to evaluate. We develop methods for two applications to evidence-based decision-making, including determining where to locate an experiment and whether policy-makers should commission new experiments or rely on an existing evidence base for making a policy decision.

Date: 2019-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.08096 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: From Local to Global: External Validity in a Fertility Natural Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: From Local to Global: External Validity in a Fertility Natural Experiment (2015)
Working Paper: From Local to Global: External Validity in a Fertility Natural Experiment (2015)
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:1906.08096

Access Statistics for this paper

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