Binary treatments are often ex-post aggregates of multiple treatments or can be disaggregated into multiple treatment versions. Thus, effects can be heterogeneous due to either effect or treatment heterogeneity. We propose a decomposition method that uncovers masked heterogeneity, avoids...

One of the perceived advantages of difference-in-differences (DiD) methods is that they do not explicitly restrict how units select into treatment. However, when justifying DiD, researchers often argue that the treatment is "quasi-randomly" assigned. We investigate what selection mechanisms are...

Can one single political leader influence macroeconomic expectations on a global scale? We design a large-scale survey experiment among influential economic experts working in more than 100 countries and use the 2020 US presidential election as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the effect...

Decarbonizing the global energy matrix through investments in renewable energy (RE) is considered a pathway to mitigate the effects of global climate change. Auctions have become an increasingly popular policy instrument for this purpose. In the last few years, auctions have been rapidly adopted...

We propose a general protocol for calibration and validation of complex simulation models by an approach based on discovery and comparison of causal structures. The key idea is that configurations of parameters of a given theoretical model are selected by minimizing a distance index between two...

We present a unifying identification strategy of dynamic average treatment effect parameters for staggered interventions when parallel trends are valid only after controlling for interactive fixed effects. This setting nests the usual parallel trends assumption, but allows treated units to have...

This paper develops a novel method for policy choice in a dynamic setting where the available data is a multi-variate time-series. Building on the statistical treatment choice framework, we propose Time-series Empirical Welfare Maximization (T-EWM) methods to estimate an optimal policy rule for...

Abstract Mediation analysis has been used in many disciplines to explain the mechanism or process that underlies an observed relationship between an exposure variable and an outcome variable via the inclusion of mediators. Decompositions of the total effect (TE) of an exposure variable into...

Abstract Analysts often use data-driven approaches to supplement their knowledge when selecting covariates for effect estimation. Multiple variable selection procedures for causal effect estimation have been devised in recent years, but additional developments are still required to adequately...