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Predicting the Distribution of Treatment Effects via Covariate-Adjustment, with an Application to Microcredit

Bruno Fava

arXiv 19 Jul 2024 · Econometrics

arXiv:2407.14635 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Important questions for impact evaluation require knowledge not only of average effects, but of the distribution of treatment effects. The inability to observe individual counterfactuals makes answering these empirical questions challenging. I propose an inference approach for points of the distribution of treatment effects by incorporating predicted counterfactuals through covariate adjustment. I provide finite-sample valid inference using sample-splitting, and asymptotically valid inference using cross-fitting, under arguably weak conditions. Revisiting five randomized controlled trials on microcredit that reported null average effects, I find important distributional impacts, with some individuals helped and others harmed by the increased credit access.

Citation extraction

57
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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 57% 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
1Fan, Y. and S. S. Park (2010) Sharp bounds on the distribution of treatment effects and their statistical inference0.96419589%
2Meager, R (2022) Aggregating distributional treatment effects: A Bayesian hierarchical analysis of the microcredit literature0.87452100%
3Ji, W., L. Lei, and A. Spector (2023) Model-Agnostic Covariate-Assisted Inference on Partially Identified Causal Effects0.86011464%
4Semenova, V (2023) Adaptive Estimation of Intersection Bounds: a Classification Approach0.84310460%
5Massart, P (1990) The tight constant in the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality0.7374275%
6Banerjee, A., D. Karlan, and J. Zinman (2015) b): Six randomized evaluations of microcredit: Introduction and further steps0.73732100%
7Meager, R (2019) Understanding the average impact of microcredit expansions: A bayesian hierarchical analysis of seven randomized experiments0.73732100%
8Stoye, J (2009) More on confidence intervals for partially identified parameters0.6445240%
9Convergences (2023) Impact Finance Barometer 2023, https://www.convergences.org/en/barometre-de-la-finance-a-impact/, accessed: 2024-03-210.64422100%
10Augsburg, B., R. De Haas, H. Harmgart, and C. Meghir (2015) The impacts of microcredit: Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina0.64422100%

Showing the top 10 of 57 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
1Training and Testing with Multiple Splits: A Central Limit Theorem for Split-Sample Estimators0.40511