arXiv 6 Jul 2026 · Econometrics
arXiv:2607.04567 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
Social scientists often ask about the effect of increasing one's duration of exposure to a social context on one's outcomes, i.e. the overlap effect. Past studies adopted a unidimensional treatment effect framework to estimate the effect of overlap, imposing important restrictions. In this paper, we propose a new causal framework of multidimensional treatments where the overlap effects include both the duration and the content of overlap, under which, for instance, the grandparent overlap effect is defined as the union of all causal effects of a grandparent's observed and unobserved characteristics (i.e., the content) on the grandchild across their shared life course (i.e., the duration). The multidimensional framework allows for a more flexible and context rich approach to effect heterogeneity, where unobserved contextual characteristics play two roles as unobserved confounders and as integral components of overlap effects -- overlap effects in this framework are not easily estimated with conventional fixed effects estimation. Hence, we develop a new cumulative fixed effects (CFE) approach that can estimate a range of interesting heterogeneous causal overlap effects from three-wave individual panel data. We show that the CFE approach is unbiased even in highly non-linear simulations, and we discuss assumptions and extensions.
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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.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Song, Xi and Robert D Mare (2019) Shared Lifetimes, Multigenerational Exposure, and Educational Mobility | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
| 2 | Rubin, Donald (1980) Discussion of" Randomization analysis of experimental data in the Fisher randomization test" by D. Basu | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 3 | Elwert, Felix and Christopher Winship (2014) Endogenous Election Bias: The Problem of Conditioning on a Collider Variable self | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 4 | Lehti, Hannu, Jani Erola, and Antti O Tanskanen (2018) Tying the Extended Family Knot-Grandparents Influence on Educational Achievement | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Mare, Robert D (2011) A Multigenerational View of Inequality | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Rüttenauer, Tobias and Volker Ludwig (2020) Fixed effects individual slopes: Accounting and testing for heterogeneous effects in panel data or other multilevel models | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Wodtke, Geoffrey T, David J Harding, and Felix Elwert (2011) Neighborhood effects in temporal perspective: The impact of long-term exposure to concentrated disadvantage on high school gradu… | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | VanderWeele, Tyler J and Miguel A Hernan (2013) Causal inference under multiple versions of treatment | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
| 9 | Brand, Jennie E and Juli Simon Thomas (2013) Causal Effect Heterogeneity | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Chamberlain, Gary (1982) Multivariate Regression Models for Panel Data | 0.405 | 1 | 1 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 38 scored citations.