每日简报

回归不连续设计的聚合：工会对不平等的影响AI 解读

We extend the regression discontinuity (RD) design to settings where each unit's treatment status is an average or aggregate across multiple discontinuity events. Such situations arise in many studies where the outcome is measured at a higher level of spatial or temporal aggregation (e.g., by state with district-level discontinuities) or when spillovers from discontinuity events are of interest. We propose two novel estimation procedures - one at the level at which the…

部分识别处理效应的广义信仰推断框架AI 解读

Over the past two decades, there has been renewed interest in fiducial inference, a statistical framework originally proposed by R. A. Fisher in the 1930s. Existing contributions, however, have largely focused on point-identified models, where the parameter vector is uniquely determined by the joint distribution of the observables and the model assumptions. This paper develops a unified fiducial inference procedure for partially identified models, thereby extending the…

异质性与内生预算集下应税收入弹性的面板估计AI 解读

This paper introduces an estimator for the average of heterogeneous elasticities of taxable income (ETI), addressing key econometric challenges posed by nonlinear budget sets. Building on an isoelastic utility framework, we derive a linear-in-logs taxable income specification that incorporates the entire budget set while allowing for individual-specific ETI and productivity growth. To account for endogenous budget sets, we employ panel data and estimate individual-specific…

球队表现的因果性宿醉效应AI 解读

It's not unreasonable to think that in-game sporting performance can be affected partly by what takes place off the court. We can't observe what happens between games directly. Instead, we proxy for the possibility of athletes partying by looking at play following games in party cities. We are interested to see if teams exhibit a decline in performance the day following a game in a city with active nightlife; we call this a "hangover effect". Part of the question is…

离策略学习中状态变量选择的图方法AI 解读

Sequential decision problems are widely studied across many areas of science. A key challenge when learning policies from historical data - a practice commonly referred to as off-policy learning - is how to ``identify'' the impact of a policy of interest when the observed data are not randomized. Off-policy learning has mainly been studied in two settings: dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs), where the focus is on controlling confounding in medical problems with short decision…

借助辅助数据识别断点回归设计中的平均因果效应AI 解读

Regression discontinuity designs are widely used when treatment assignment is determined by whether a running variable exceeds a predefined threshold. However, most research focuses on estimating local causal effects at the threshold, leaving the challenge of identifying treatment effects away from the cutoff largely unaddressed. The primary difficulty in this context is that the treatment assignment is deterministically defined by the running variable, violating the…

利用代理变量高效估计存在未测混杂的平均处理效应AI 解读

Proximal causal inference provides a framework for estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) in the presence of unmeasured confounding by leveraging outcome and treatment proxies. Identification in this framework relies on the existence of a so-called bridge function. Standard approaches typically postulate a parametric specification for the bridge function, which is estimated in a first step and then plugged into an ATE estimator. However, this sequential procedure…

扰动下基因调控网络发现的可解释神经常微分方程AI 解读

Modern high-throughput biological datasets containing thousands of perturbations enable large-scale discovery of causal graphs that represent regulatory interactions between genes. Differentiable causal graphical models and regression-based methods have been developed to infer gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from interventional datasets. However, existing approaches fail to capture the non-linear dynamics of biological processes such as cellular differentiation. To address…

时变暴露下的工具变量：血运重建对生活质量的动态效应AI 解读

This paper develops instrumental variables (IV) estimators for dynamic causal effects in randomized trials with imperfect compliance. These methods are applied to a randomized trial that assigned patients with ischemic heart disease to either an invasive treatment arm centered on revascularization or a control group meant to receive non-invasive medical therapy. As is common in such ``strategy trials,'' many participants assigned to treatment remained untreated while many…

用因果贝叶斯网络与赖欣巴赫原则重新审视格兰杰因果AI 解读

Granger causality (GC) is widely used to infer directed relationships in time-series data. However, its predictive criterion does not by itself distinguish direct causal effects from dependencies induced by common causes, indirect paths, collider conditioning, or model misspecification. We revisit this limitation by interpreting bivariate and multivariate GC through causal Bayesian networks and Reichenbachs common cause principles. Under explicit graphical assumptions,…

稀疏市场—产品冲击下的离散选择需求模型估计AI 解读

When credible instruments are scarce or estimates hinge on instrument choice, an alternative to the leading Berry--Levinsohn--Pakes (BLP) approach to demand estimation with aggregate data can be useful. We propose a Bayesian random-coefficients discrete-choice demand estimator that jointly recovers preference parameters and market--product demand shocks under a sparsity restriction, without requiring instrumental variables. Shrinkage priors select a sparse set of active…

用于观察性研究因果推断的 AI 贝叶斯生成式建模AI 解读

Causal inference in observational studies with high-dimensional covariates presents significant challenges. We introduce CausalBGM, an AI-powered Bayesian generative modeling approach that captures the causal relationship among covariates, treatment, and outcome. The core innovation is to estimate the individual treatment effect (ITE) by learning the individual-specific distribution of a low-dimensional latent feature set (e.g., latent confounders) that drives changes in…

显示性社会网络AI 解读

The linear-in-means model is the standard empirical model of peer effects and asks that an agent's choice or outcome is a combination of their ideal point and the mean outcome of their group. Using choice data and exogenous group variation, we develop a revealed preference style test for the linear-in-means model. This test is formulated as a linear program and can be interpreted as a condition about differentiating the behavior of each agent in a consistent manner. We then…

重复事件与竞争事件下的因果推断AI 解读

Many research questions concern treatment effects on outcomes that can recur several times in the same individual. For example, medical researchers are interested in treatment effects on hospitalizations in heart failure patients and sports injuries in athletes. Competing events, such as death, complicate causal inference in studies of recurrent events because once a competing event occurs, an individual cannot have more recurrent events. Several statistical estimands have…

含固定效应的静态面板模型中的双重机器学习AI 解读

Recent advances in causal inference have seen the development of methods which make use of the predictive power of machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we develop novel double machine learning (DML) procedures for panel data in which these algorithms are used to approximate high-dimensional and nonlinear nuisance functions of the covariates. Our new procedures are extensions of the well-known correlated random effects, within-group and first-difference estimators from…

因果效应推广与迁移的高效方法AI 解读

When estimating causal effects, it is important to assess external validity, i.e., determine how useful a given study is to inform a practical question for a specific target population. One challenge is that the covariate distribution in the population underlying a study may be different from that in the target population. If some covariates are effect modifiers, the average treatment effect (ATE) may not generalize to the target population. To tackle this problem, we…

长期剂量反应曲线的核方法AI 解读

A core challenge in causal inference is how to extrapolate long term effects, of possibly continuous actions, from short term experimental data. It arises in artificial intelligence: the long term consequences of continuous actions may be of interest, yet only short term rewards may be collected in exploration. For this estimand, called the long term dose response curve, we propose a simple nonparametric estimator based on kernel ridge regression. By embedding the…

多变量连续处理的效应异质性与重要性度量AI 解读

Estimating the joint effect of a multivariate, continuous exposure is crucial, particularly in environmental health where interest lies in simultaneously evaluating the impact of multiple environmental pollutants on health. We develop novel methodology that addresses two key issues for estimation of treatment effects of multivariate, continuous exposures. We use nonparametric Bayesian methodology that is flexible to ensure our approach can capture a wide range of data…

匹配观察性研究中隐性偏差分位数的敏感性分析AI 解读

Causal conclusions from observational studies may be sensitive to unmeasured confounding. In such cases, a sensitivity analysis is often conducted, which tries to infer the minimum amount of hidden biases or the minimum strength of unmeasured confounding needed in order to explain away the observed association between treatment and outcome. If the needed bias is large, then the treatment is likely to have significant effects. The Rosenbaum sensitivity analysis is a modern…

利用人类反应时间改进基于偏好的线性老虎机学习AI 解读

Interactive preference learning systems infer human preferences by presenting queries as pairs of options and collecting binary choices. Although binary choices are simple and widely used, they provide limited information about preference strength. To address this, we leverage human response times, which are inversely related to preference strength, as an additional signal. We propose a computationally efficient method that combines choices and response times to estimate…

基于匹配的政策学习AI 解读

The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy learning has been estimating and maximizing the value function using weighting techniques. Matching is widely used in many applied disciplines to infer causal effects, which is intuitively appealing because the observed covariates are directly…

存在内生性时 Probit 与 Tobit 模型的边际效应AI 解读

When evaluating partial effects, it is important to distinguish between structural endogeneity and measurement errors. In contrast to linear models, these two sources of endogeneity affect partial effects differently in nonlinear models. We study this issue focusing on the Instrumental Variable (IV) Probit and Tobit models. We show that even when a valid IV is available, failing to differentiate between the two types of endogeneity can lead to either under- or…

增强 Lee 界的稳健性并收紧区间：随机单调性与对称性下的样本选择模型AI 解读

In the presence of sample selection, Lee's (2009) nonparametric bounds are a popular tool for estimating a treatment effect. However, the Lee bounds rely on the monotonicity assumption, whose empirical validity is sometimes unclear. Furthermore, the bounds are often regarded to be wide and less informative even under monotonicity. To address these issues, this study introduces a stochastic version of the monotonicity assumption alongside a nonparametric distributional shape…