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Causal Interpretation of Regressions With Ranks

Lihua Lei

arXiv 8 Jun 2024 · Econometrics · 1 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2406.05548 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

In studies of educational production functions or intergenerational mobility, it is common to transform the key variables into percentile ranks. Yet, it remains unclear what the regression coefficient estimates with ranks of the outcome or the treatment. In this paper, we derive effective causal estimands for a broad class of commonly-used regression methods, including the ordinary least squares (OLS), two-stage least squares (2SLS), difference-in-differences (DiD), and regression discontinuity designs (RDD). Specifically, we introduce a novel primitive causal estimand, the Rank Average Treatment Effect (rank-ATE), and prove that it serves as the building block of the effective estimands of all the aforementioned econometrics methods. For 2SLS, DiD, and RDD, we show that direct applications to outcome ranks identify parameters that are difficult to interpret. To address this issue, we develop alternative methods to identify more interpretable causal parameters.

Citation extraction

48
references
84
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distinct cited
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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
1Jonathan Roth and Pedro HC Sant'Anna (2023) When is parallel trends sensitive to functional form?0.92843100%
2Denis Chetverikov and Daniel Wilhelm (2023) Inference for rank-rank regressions0.87482100%
3Guido W Imbens and Thomas Lemieux (2008) Regression discontinuity designs: A guide to practice0.87462100%
4Yanqin Fan and Sang Soo Park (2010) Sharp bounds on the distribution of treatment effects and their statistical inference0.84333100%
5Wenlong Ji, Lihua Lei, and Asher Spector (2023) Model-agnostic covariate-assisted inference on partially identified causal effects self0.84333100%
6Susan Athey and Guido W Imbens (2006) Identification and inference in nonlinear difference-in-differences models0.81142100%
7Guido W Imbens and Joshua D Angrist (1994) Identification and estimation of local average treatment effects0.7373367%
8Joshua Angrist (1995) Estimating the labor market impact of voluntary military service using social security data on military applicants, 19950.64422100%
9Kirill Borusyak and Peter Hull (2024) Negative weights are no concern in design-based specifications0.64422100%
10Jiafeng Chen and Jonathan Roth (2023) Logs with zeros? some problems and solutions0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 48 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
1Conditional Rank-Rank Regression$^*$0.40511