每日简报

交错双重差分中的部分同质性AI 解读

In staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) designs, units enter treatment at different calendar times, so the treatment effect is not a single number but a set of Cohort-Average Treatment effects on the Treated (CATTs), one per cohort-time cell. Estimating every CATT as its own parameter, as the standard fully flexible estimator does, is unbiased but inefficient when some of these effects are in fact equal, whereas pooling them all into a single two-way fixed effects…

因果模型的推断等价类AI 解读

Causal models in the same Markov equivalence class are, in the absence of strong assumptions, statistically indistinguishable at any sample size. For modest sample sizes there is also the possibility that several such classes are compatible with the data, pointing to a confidence set of causal models as the appropriate presentation of evidence. Non-identifiability of Gaussian causal models from the same Markov equivalence class corresponds to a plurality of…

Cox 模型中的亚组处理效应一致性检验AI 解读

An overall treatment effect in a clinical trial may inadequately represent particular patient subgroups, creating uncertainty about whether a population-level efficacy conclusion can legitimately be transferred to them. Conventional interaction tests only investigate whether subgroup-specific treatment effects are exactly equal or not, but cannot detect whether the differences are small enough to be clinically negligible. We develop a formal framework for assessing subgroup…

通过分布映射实现反事实公平的强化学习AI 解读

Reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to optimize sequential decisions to maximize population-level benefits over time. However, when deployed in high-stakes settings such as healthcare, RL decisions might systematically restrict some subpopulation's access to valuable services in a manner contrary to the values and goals of stakeholders. Counterfactual fairness (CF) offers a promising framework to address this problem based on causal reasoning. This paper develops a data…

短面板中的平稳误差与分位数回归AI 解读

This paper studies a linear panel model with an unrestricted individual effect and a time- stationary idiosyncratic disturbance. We first show that stationarity is a strong restriction in a quantile model. In a linear conditional quantile specification with quantile-dependent slopes, equality of the conditional residual distributions across periods generically forces the slope coefficient to be constant over the quantile index. Thus, a stationary-error model identifies a…

识别变异集中时固定效应回归的精确推断AI 解读

In fixed-effect regressions with many groups, fixed effects can absorb most identifying variation, leaving a handful of observations to carry what remains. When variation is this concentrated, conventional $t$-tests can reject a true null more than half the time, and any fixed critical value is either invalid or so conservative it has essentially no power. This paper builds an exact test from the design alone. A \textit{nuisance-annihilating contrast} is a linear combination…

利用阳性组复检的群组检测评估处理效应AI 解读

Group testing is an established, highly cost-effective strategy for population-level disease surveillance that identifies positive individuals by pooling biological specimens. Originally introduced during World War II for large-scale screening and heavily utilized in modern high-throughput public health infrastructure, traditional group testing methods are restricted to purely associational analyses. Consequently, they lack the capacity to infer the direct causal effect of…

含不良控制变量的双重差分AI 解读

This paper considers difference-in-differences identification strategies when the parallel trends assumption holds after conditioning on covariates that may themselves be affected by the treatment (often referred to as "bad controls"). We show that common approaches such as simply dropping bad controls are often ill-advised and develop two alternative approaches that allow bad controls to function as genuine controls despite being affected by treatment. First, we derive…

饱和固定效应推断的崩溃可靠度AI 解读

Fixed-effect saturation does not itself distort conventional inference, but classical measurement error does. Under a local noise drift $σ_ν^2=c^2/n$, the FE-OLS $t$-statistic converges to a non-central normal; saturation contributes a common $\sqrt{1-ρ}$ scaling rather than preferentially destroying signal or noise. Inverting the size distortion gives a Stock--Yogo-style critical value. Self-consistency of the within-reliability-corrected pilot yields a breakdown…

分类处理与二元近端结局微随机试验的因果效应估计及样本量计算AI 解读

Micro-randomized trials (MRTs) provide a framework for evaluating the marginal and moderated effects of mobile health (mHealth) interventions. In many applications, treatments take the form of categorical variables with multiple levels, such as different message contents or delivery strategies. Many scientifically meaningful longitudinal outcomes in mHealth studies are binary, such as whether a participant opens an app, engages with content, or completes a target behavior…

利用代理变量对因果效应进行部分识别AI 解读

Proximal causal inference is a framework for evaluating the causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding. For point identification, it leverages a pair of proxy variables to identify a bridge function that matches the dependence of potential outcomes or treatment variables on the hidden factors to corresponding functions of observed proxies. Unique identification requires that proxies are sufficiently relevant for hidden factors, a requirement that has previously…

单人试验的因果推断AI 解读

The aim of personalized medicine is to tailor treatment decisions to individuals' characteristics. N-of-1 trials are within-person crossover trials that hold the promise of targeting individual-specific effects. While the idea behind N-of-1 trials might seem simple, analyzing and interpreting N-of-1 trials is not straightforward. Here we ground N-of-1 trials in a formal causal inference framework and formalize intuitive claims from the N-of-1 trials literature. We focus on…

用离散选择模型逼近选择数据AI 解读

We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition under which random-coefficient discrete choice models, such as mixed-logit models, are rich enough to approximate any nonparametric random utility models arbitrarily well across choice sets. The condition turns out to be the affine-independence of the set of characteristic vectors. When the condition fails, resulting in some random utility models that cannot be closely approximated, we identify preferences and substitution…

不可观测因素的效应检验：婚姻前景是否影响大学专业选择？AI 解读

This paper develops an econometric test for whether an unobservable factor jointly influences a choice among multiple alternatives and a subsequent binary outcome. Because only transformed versions of the choice model's unobservables are identified, we combine a copula-based joint model with results on the covariance between ordered and unordered normal variables to recover the covariance between structural shocks, yielding a simulation-based test for a common unobserved…

有限总体中的单调性检验AI 解读

We consider the extent to which we can learn from a completely randomized experiment whether all individuals have treatment effects that are weakly of the same sign, a condition we call monotonicity. From a classical sampling perspective, it is well-known that monotonicity is not falsifiable. We show that from the design-based perspective---in which the potential outcomes are fixed and only treatment assignment is stochastic---that the distribution of treatment effects in…

Probit 回归中的强对数凹性AI 解读

We show that strong log-concavity emerges in probit regression likelihoods without ridge penalization (i.e. Gaussian priors), unlike for the logistic case. Specifically, we provide: (a) a non-asymptotic characterization of strong log-concavity for fixed designs, similar to that for the existence of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and (b) an asymptotic analysis for random designs, in the proportional regime when the sample size $n$ and the number of covariates $d$ grow…

交叉拟合折数较多时的去偏机器学习AI 解读

This paper studies debiased machine learning (DML) when the number of cross-fitting folds, $K_n$, may grow with the sample size $n$. Existing fixed-$K$ asymptotic theory implies that DML1 and DML2, the two main DML variants, are asymptotically equivalent, providing no guidance on which variant to use or how to choose $K_n$. We show that this equivalence can break down when $K_n$ grows proportionally to $\sqrt{n}$: DML1 can exhibit asymptotic bias, in which case standard…

时空因果推断中的异质性处理效应估计AI 解读

Scholars from diverse fields increasingly rely on high-frequency spatio-temporal data. Yet, causal inference with these data remains challenging due to spatial spillover and temporal carryover effects. We develop methods to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects by allowing for arbitrary spatial and temporal causal dependencies. We focus on common settings where the treatment and outcomes are time-varying spatial point patterns and where moderators are either spatial or…

面板数据中所选群组的条件选择后推断AI 解读

We consider the problem of testing for differences in group-specific slopes between the selected groups in panel data identified via k-means clustering. In this setting, the classical Wald-type test statistic is problematic because it produces an extremely inflated type I error probability. The underlying reason is that the same dataset is used to identify the group structure and construct the test statistic, simultaneously. This creates dependence between the selection and…

对提前反应与平行趋势违背的联合敏感性分析AI 解读

Two key identifying assumptions used to justify difference-in-differences are parallel trends and no anticipation, yet both may fail in practice. I propose a class of assumptions that constitute deviations from no anticipation and derive closed-form, sharp bounds for several common treatment effect parameters while simultaneously relaxing parallel trends. Deviations from both assumptions are jointly disciplined using observed pre-trends. When some anticipation is imposed,…

类别型工具变量模型：刻画、部分识别与统计推断AI 解读

We study categorical instrumental variable (IV) models with instrument, treatment and outcome taking finitely many values. We derive a simple closed-form characterization of the set of joint distributions of potential outcomes that are compatible with a given observed data distribution in terms of a minimal set of inequalities. These inequalities unify several different IV models defined by versions of the independence and exclusion restriction assumptions. They lead to…

不完整数据下的不平等界限AI 解读

We study inequality measures when outcomes are observed only in intervals, as in historical tabulations, privacy-protected grouped data, and modern surveys. We develop a nonparametric framework for sharp identification and inference with grouped and interval-valued data, covering brackets and overlapping intervals. For a class of inequality indices, sharp bounds are attained by discrete distributions with finite support, reducing the problem to optimization;…

处理组特异非高斯误差下平均处理效应的结构化半参数估计AI 解读

This paper studies average treatment effect (ATE) estimation for continuous outcomes when the treatment-covariate mean is structured but the error distributions are unknown and may differ across treatment arms in scale, skewness, or tail behavior. We introduce a semiparametric model with a finite-dimensional mean, or a prespecified basis expansion, and separate unrestricted additive error laws for treated and control outcomes. The central theoretical contribution is the…

二元结局下 Fisher 尖锐零假设的差分隐私检验AI 解读

Across many disciplines, causal inference often relies on randomized experiments with binary outcomes. In such experiments, often analysts are interested in testing Fisher's sharp null hypothesis, i.e., the treatment has zero effect on the outcome for every study subject. Sometimes the outcomes are sensitive and must be kept confidential, for example, when they comprise physical or mental health measurements. Releasing test statistics or p-values computed with the…