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Estimating Treatment Effects in Mover Designs

Peter Hull

arXiv 18 Apr 2018 · Econometrics · 4 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:1804.06721 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Researchers increasingly leverage movement across multiple treatments to estimate causal effects. While these "mover regressions" are often motivated by a linear constant-effects model, it is not clear what they capture under weaker quasi-experimental assumptions. I show that binary treatment mover regressions recover a convex average of four difference-in-difference comparisons and are thus causally interpretable under a standard parallel trends assumption. Estimates from multiple-treatment models, however, need not be causal without stronger restrictions on the heterogeneity of treatment effects and time-varying shocks. I propose a class of two-step estimators to isolate and combine the large set of difference-in-difference quasi-experiments generated by a mover design, identifying mover average treatment effects under conditional-on-covariate parallel trends and effect homogeneity restrictions. I characterize the efficient estimators in this class and derive specification tests based on the model's overidentifying restrictions. Future drafts will apply the theory to the Finkelstein et al. (2016) movers design, analyzing the causal effects of geography on healthcare utilization.

Citation extraction

49
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74
in-text mentions
49
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appendix boundary found by appendix_titled_section at “Appendix” · 70% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Card, D., J. Heining, and P. Kline (2013) Workplace Heterogeneity and the Rise of West German Wage Inequality0.92843100%
2Finkelstein, A., M. Gentzkow, and H. Williams (2016) Sources of Geographic Variation in Health Care: Evidence from Patient Migration0.87472100%
3Abadie, A (2005) Semiparametric Difference-in-Differences Estimators0.81142100%
4Chernozhukov, V., I. Fernandez-Val, J. Hahn, and W. Newey (2013) Average and Quantile Effects in Nonseparable Panel Models0.73732100%
5Imai, K. and I. S. Kim (2016) When Should We Use Linear Fixed Effects Regression Models for Causal Inference with Longitudinal Data? Working Paper0.73732100%
6Abowd, J. M., K. L. McKinney, and I. M. Schmutte (2015) Modeling Endogenous Mobility in Wage Determination, Working Paper0.64422100%
7Angrist, J. and I. Fernandez-Val (2013) ExtrapoLATE-ing: External Validity and Overidentification in the LATE Framework0.64422100%
8Angrist, J. and M. Rokkanen (2015) Wanna Get Away? Regression DIscontinuity Estimation of Exam School Effects Away from the Cutoff0.64422100%
9Ashenfelter, O. and D. Card (1985) Using the Longitudinal Structure of Earnings to Estimate the Effect of Training Programs0.64422100%
10Bonhomme, S., T. Lamadon, and E. Manresa (2017) A Distributional Framework for Matched Employer Employee Data, Working Paper0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 49 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions0.84353
2Instrument-based estimation of full treatment effects with movers0.64422
3Quasi-Experimental Shift-Share Research Designs0.40511
4Design-based Analysis in Difference-In-Differences Settings with Staggered Adoption0.40511
5Two-way Fixed Effects and Differences-in-Differences Estimators with Several Treatments0.40511
6Estimating Heterogeneous Effects: Applications to Labor Economics0.40511
7Difference-in-Differences with Multiple Events0.40511