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TEA-Time: Transporting Effects Across Time

Harsh Parikh, Gabriel Levin-Konigsberg, Dominique Perrault-Joncas, Alexander Volfovsky

arXiv 7 Mar 2026 · Statistics — Methodology

arXiv:2603.07018 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Treatment effects estimated from randomized controlled trials are local not only to the study population but also to the time at which the trial was conducted. We develop a framework for temporal transportation: extrapolating treatment effects to time periods where no experiment was conducted. We target the transported average treatment effect (TATE) and show that under a separable temporal effects assumption, the TATE decomposes into an observed average treatment effect and a temporal ratio. We provide two identification strategies -- one using replicated trials comparing the same treatments at different times, another using common treatment arms observed across time -- and develop doubly robust, semiparametrically efficient estimators for each. Monte Carlo simulations confirm that both estimators achieve nominal coverage, with the common arm strategy yielding substantial efficiency gains when its stronger assumptions hold. We apply our methods to A/B tests from the Upworthy Research Archive, demonstrating that the two strategies exhibit a variance-bias tradeoff: the common arm approach offers greater precision but may incur bias when treatments interact heterogeneously with temporal factors.

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30
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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
1Matias, J. Nathan and Munger, Kevin and Le Quere, Marianne Aubin and… (2021) The Upworthy Research Archive: A Time Series of 32,487 Experiments in U.S. Media0.8435360%
2Chernozhukov, Victor and Chetverikov, Denis and Demirer, Mert and Du… (2018) Double/Debiased Machine Learning for Treatment and Structural Parameters0.5112250%
3Reimers, Nils and Gurevych, Iryna (2019) Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks0.5112250%
4Parikh, Harsh and Morucci, Marco and Orlandi, Vittorio and Roy, Sude… (2025) A Double Machine Learning Approach for Combining Experimental and Observational Studies self0.51121100%
5Abadie, Alberto and Diamond, Alexis and Hainmueller, Jens (2010) Synthetic control methods for comparative case studies: Estimating the effect of California's tobacco control program0.40511100%
6Abadie, Alberto and Diamond, Alexis and Hainmueller, Jens (2015) Comparative politics and the synthetic control method0.40511100%
7Arkhangelsky, Dmitry and Athey, Susan and Hirshberg, David A and Imb… (2021) Synthetic difference-in-differences0.40511100%
8Athey, Susan and Bayati, Mohsen and Doudchenko, Nikolay and Imbens,… (2021) Matrix Completion Methods for Causal Panel Data Models0.40511100%
9Bai, Jushan (2009) Panel Data Models with Interactive Fixed Effects0.40511100%
10Bang, Heejung and Robins, James M (2005) Doubly Robust Estimation in Missing Data and Causal Inference Models0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 30 scored citations.