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Policy decisions often hinge on conventional p-value thresholds, which ignore economic costs and benefits of further data collection. This paper recasts statistical significance as a choice between making an immediate policy recommendation and deferring it until further evidence is collected. The welfare-optimal decision corresponds, under minimax regret, to a statistical test whose level depends on the cost and precision of additional evidence. Inverting this rule, we…

学习该学什么：结合实验与观察证据的实验设计AI 解读

Experiments deliver credible treatment-effect estimates but, because they are costly, are often restricted to specific sites, small populations, or particular mechanisms. A common practice across several fields is therefore to combine experimental estimates with reduced-form or structural external (observational) evidence to answer broader policy questions, such as those involving general equilibrium effects or external validity. We develop a unified framework for the design…

兼顾未知的证据聚合：学习效应原型与知识边界AI 解读

When evaluating policy interventions, researchers often pursue two related goals: identifying which individuals or contexts benefit most, and determining whether patterns of treatment effect heterogeneity can be used to aggregate evidence across environments. We develop a framework that aggregates treatment effect heterogeneity, defined over individual and environmental characteristics, into interpretable summaries while setting aside contexts in which extrapolation is…

使用遥感结果变量的项目评估AI 解读

We study causal inference in experiments and quasi-experiments, where the economic outcome is imperfectly measured by a remotely sensed variable. The remotely sensed variable is low-cost, scalable, and predictive of the economic outcome in observational data; examples include satellite imagery and mobile phone activity. We model the remotely sensed variable as post-outcome: variation in the economic outcome causes variation in the remotely sensed variable. For example,…

因果聚类：网络干扰下的群组实验设计AI 解读

This paper studies the design of cluster experiments to estimate the global treatment effect in the presence of network spillovers. We provide a framework to choose the clustering that minimizes the worst-case mean-squared error of the estimated global effect. We show that optimal clustering solves a novel penalized min-cut optimization problem computed via off-the-shelf semi-definite programming algorithms. Our analysis also characterizes simple conditions to choose between…

动态协变量平衡：用潜在结果局部投影估计跨期处理效应AI 解读

This paper studies the estimation and inference of treatment effects in panel data settings when treatments change dynamically over time. We propose a balancing method that allows for (i) treatments to be assigned dynamically over time based on high-dimensional covariates, past outcomes, and treatments; (ii) outcomes and time-varying covariates to depend on the trajectory of all past treatments; (iii) heterogeneity of treatment effects. Our approach recursively projects…

三重稳健面板估计量AI 解读

This paper studies estimation of causal effects in a panel data setting. We introduce a new estimator, the Triply RObust Panel (TROP) estimator, that combines (i) a flexible model for the potential outcomes based on a low-rank factor structure on top of a two-way-fixed effect specification, with (ii) unit weights intended to upweight units similar to the treated units and (iii) time weights intended to upweight time periods close to the treated time periods. We study the…

存在混杂时合成控制的识别与推断AI 解读

This paper studies inference on treatment effects in panel data settings with unobserved confounding. We model outcome variables through a factor model with random factors and loadings. Such factors and loadings may act as unobserved confounders: when the treatment is implemented depends on time-varying factors, and who receives the treatment depends on unit-level confounders. We study the identification of treatment effects and illustrate the presence of a trade-off between…