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衰退与复苏期间对小企业的支持AI 解读

We use variation in the access to a government credit certification program to estimate the financial and real effects of supporting small firms. This program was first implemented during the global financial crisis, but has remained active ever since, allowing us to analyze its effects both during recessions and recoveries. Eligible firms have access to government loan guarantees and a credit quality certification. We estimate real effects using a multidimensional…

多处理臂及可能包含析因结构的实验中的协变量调整AI 解读

Abstract Randomized experiments are the gold standard for causal inference and enable unbiased estimation of treatment effects. Regression adjustment provides a convenient way to incorporate covariate information for additional efficiency. This article provides a unified account of its utility for improving estimation efficiency in multiarmed experiments. We start with the commonly used additive and fully interacted models for regression adjustment in estimating average…

倾向得分在观察性因果研究设计中的作用AI 解读

Summary The design of any study, whether experimental or observational, that is intended to estimate the causal effects of a treatment condition relative to a control condition refers to those activities that precede any examination of outcome variables. As defined in our 1983 article (Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1983), the propensity score is the unit-level conditional probability of assignment to treatment versus control given the observed covariates; so the propensity score…

具有有限样本保证的简明通用去偏机器学习定理AI 解读

Summary Debiased machine learning is a meta-algorithm based on bias correction and sample splitting to calculate confidence intervals for functionals, i.e., scalar summaries, of machine learning algorithms. For example, an analyst may seek the confidence interval for a treatment effect estimated with a neural network. We present a non-asymptotic debiased machine learning theorem that encompasses any global or local functional of any machine learning algorithm that satisfies…

高维高斯图模型的统一推断AI 解读

Summary Graphical models have become a popular tool for representing dependencies within large sets of variables and are crucial for representing causal structures. We provide results for uniform inference on high-dimensional graphical models, in which the number of target parameters $d$ is potentially much larger than the sample size, under approximate sparsity. Our results highlight how graphical models can be estimated and recovered using modern machine learning methods…

存在处理习惯化的时序实验中因果效应的极小极大设计AI 解读

Summary In many modern settings, such as an online marketplace, randomized experiments need to be executed over multiple time periods. In such temporal experiments, it has been observed that the effects of an intervention on an experimental unit may be large when the unit is first exposed to it, but then it attenuates after repeated exposures. This is typically due to units’ habituation to the intervention, or some other form of learning, such as when users gradually start…

时变处理边际结构Cox模型的工具变量估计AI 解读

Summary Robins (1998) introduced marginal structural models, a general class of counterfactual models for the joint effects of time-varying treatments in complex longitudinal studies subject to time-varying confounding. Robins (1998) established the identification of marginal structural model parameters under a sequential randomization assumption, which rules out unmeasured confounding of treatment assignment over time. The marginal structural Cox model is one of the most…

一般均衡下的大规模教育改革：来自印度的断点回归证据AI 解读

The economic consequences of large-scale government investments in education depend on general equilibrium effects in both the labor market and the education sector. I develop a general equilibrium model capturing the consequences of massive countrywide schooling initiatives. I provide unbiased estimates of the model’s elasticities, using a regression discontinuity derived from Indian government policy. The earnings returns to a year of education are 13.4%, and the general…

无环有向混合图的嵌套马尔可夫性质AI 解读

Conditional independence models associated with directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) may be characterized in at least three different ways: via a factorization, the global Markov property (given by the d-separation criterion), and the local Markov property. Marginals of DAG models also imply equality constraints that are not conditional independences; the well-known “Verma constraint” is an example. Constraints of this type are used for testing edges, and in a computationally…

破解孟德尔随机化中的赢家诅咒：再随机化逆方差加权估计量AI 解读

Developments in genome-wide association studies and the increasing availability of summary genetic association data have made the application of two-sample Mendelian Randomization (MR) with summary data increasingly popular. Conventional two-sample MR methods often employ the same sample for selecting relevant genetic variants and for constructing final causal estimates. Such a practice often leads to biased causal effect estimates due to the well-known “winner’s curse”…

为什么要随机化？置换不变性下的极小极大最优性AI 解读

This paper studies finite sample minimax optimal randomization schemes and estimation schemes in estimating parameters including the average treatment effect, when treatment effects are heterogeneous. A randomization scheme is a distribution over a group of permutations of a given treatment assignment vector. An estimation scheme is a joint distribution over assignment vectors, linear estimators, and permutations of assignment vectors. The key element in the minimax problem…

通过推断潜在位置估计同质性社会网络中的因果同伴影响AI 解读

Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, that is, with a node’s network partners being informative about the node’s attributes and therefore its behavior. If the network grows according to either a latent community (stochastic block) model, or a continuous latent space model, then latent homophilous attributes can be consistently estimated from the global…

高维混杂下加性风险模型的治疗效应估计AI 解读

Estimating treatment effects for survival outcomes in the high-dimensional setting is critical for many biomedical applications and any application with censored observations. This article establishes an “orthogonal” score for learning treatment effects, using observational data with a potentially large number of confounders. The estimator allows for root-n, asymptotically valid confidence intervals, despite the bias induced by the regularization. Moreover, we develop a…

不完美随机实验中因果效应的非参数界AI 解读

Nonignorable missingness and noncompliance can occur even in well-designed randomized experiments, making the intervention effect that the experiment was designed to estimate nonidentifiable. Nonparametric causal bounds provide a way to narrow the range of possible values for a nonidentifiable causal effect with minimal assumptions. We derive novel bounds for the causal risk difference for a binary outcome and intervention in randomized experiments with nonignorable…

广义 Oaxaca–Blinder 估计量AI 解读

After performing a randomized experiment, researchers often use ordinary least-square (OLS) regression to adjust for baseline covariates when estimating the average treatment effect. It is widely known that the resulting confidence interval is valid even if the linear model is misspecified. In this article, we generalize that conclusion to covariate adjustment with nonlinear models. We introduce an intuitive way to use any “simple” nonlinear model to construct a…

高维最优治疗规则的模型辅助一致诚实推断AI 解读

This article develops new tools to quantify uncertainty in optimal decision making and to gain insight into which variables one should collect information about given the potential cost of measuring a large number of variables. We investigate simultaneous inference to determine if a group of variables is relevant for estimating an optimal decision rule in a high-dimensional semiparametric framework. The unknown link function permits flexible modeling of the interactions…

连续处理的断点回归设计AI 解读

The standard regression discontinuity (RD) design deals with a binary treatment. Many empirical applications of RD designs involve continuous treatments. This article establishes identification and robust bias-corrected inference for such RD designs. Causal identification is achieved by using any changes in the distribution of the continuous treatment at the RD threshold (including the usual mean change as a special case). We discuss a double-robust identification approach…

个体化治疗规则的实验评估AI 解读

The increasing availability of individual-level data has led to numerous applications of individualized (or personalized) treatment rules (ITRs). Policy makers often wish to empirically evaluate ITRs and compare their relative performance before implementing them in a target population. We propose a new evaluation metric, the population average prescriptive effect (PAPE). The PAPE compares the performance of ITR with that of non-individualized treatment rule, which randomly…

以调查回答行为代理未观测能力：理论与证据AI 解读

An emerging literature is experimenting with using survey response behavior as a proxy for hard-to-measure abilities. We contribute to this literature by formalizing this idea and evaluating its benefits and risks. Using a standard and nationally representative survey from Australia, we demonstrate that the survey item-response rate (SIRR), a straightforward summary measure of response behavior, varies more with cognitive than with noncognitive ability. We evaluate whether…

倾向得分估计中的最优协变量平衡条件AI 解读

Inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) is a popular method for estimating the average treatment effect (ATE). However, empirical studies show that the IPTW estimators can be sensitive to the misspecification of the propensity score model. To address this problem, researchers have proposed to estimate propensity score by directly optimizing the balance of pretreatment covariates. While these methods appear to empirically perform well, little is known about how the…

融合专家意见的综合指数构造AI 解读

Composite index is a powerful and popularly used tool in providing an overall measure of a subject by summarizing a group of measurements (component indices) of different aspects of the subject. It is widely used in economics, finance, policy evaluation, performance ranking, and many other fields. Effective construction of a composite index has been studied extensively. The most widely used approach is to use a linear combination of the component indices, where the…

外资所有权的动态与非中性生产率效应：非参数方法AI 解读

Summary This paper studies two novel productivity characteristics of foreign acquisition on high‐tech manufacturing firms: the dynamic and the non‐Hicks‐neutral effects. A dynamic productivity effect of foreign ownership arises when adoption of foreign technology and management practices takes time to fully realize. Furthermore, these dynamic adjustments may be capital or labor augmenting as adoption of advanced production technologies tends to have non‐neutral productivity…

同根异叶：面板数据中的时间序列与横截面方法AI 解读

One dominant approach to evaluate the causal effect of a treatment is through panel data analysis, whereby the behaviors of multiple units are observed over time. The information across time and units motivates two general approaches: (i) horizontal regression (i.e., unconfoundedness), which exploits time series patterns, and (ii) vertical regression (e.g., synthetic controls), which exploits cross‐sectional patterns. Conventional wisdom often considers the two approaches to…

基于最近邻匹配的估计：从密度比到平均处理效应AI 解读

Nearest neighbor (NN) matching is widely used in observational studies for causal effects. Abadie and Imbens (2006) provided the first large‐sample analysis of NN matching. Their theory focuses on the case with the number of NNs, M fixed. We reveal something new out of their study and show that once allowing M to diverge with the sample size an intrinsic statistic in their analysis constitutes a consistent estimator of the density ratio with regard to covariates across the…