Trading-off Bias and Variance in Stratified Experiments and in Staggered Adoption Designs, Under a Boundedness Condition on the Magnitude of the Treatment Effect - Sciences Po Access content directly
Preprints, Working Papers, ... (Working Paper) Year : 2022

Trading-off Bias and Variance in Stratified Experiments and in Staggered Adoption Designs, Under a Boundedness Condition on the Magnitude of the Treatment Effect

Abstract

I consider estimation of the average treatment effect (ATE), in a population composed of G groups, when one has unbiased and uncorrelated estimators of each group's conditional average treatment effect (CATE). These conditions are met in stratified randomized experiments. I assume that the outcome is homoscedastic, and that each CATE is bounded in absolute value by B standard deviations of the outcome, for some known B. I derive, across all linear combinations of the CATEs' estimators, the estimator of the ATE with the lowest worst-case mean-squared error. This minimax-linear estimator assigns a weight equal to group g's share in the population to the most precisely estimated CATEs, and a weight proportional to one over the estimator's variance to the least precisely estimated CATEs. I also derive the minimax-linear estimator when the CATEs' estimators are positively correlated, a condition that may be met by differences-indifferences estimators in staggered adoption designs.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
2022_de_chaisemartin_trading_off_bias_and_variance_in_stratified_experiments_and_in_staggered_adoption_designs_under_a_boundedness_condition_on_the_magnitude_of_the_treatment_effect.pdf (557.19 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)

Dates and versions

hal-03873919 , version 1 (27-11-2022)

Licence

Attribution - NonCommercial

Identifiers

  • HAL Id : hal-03873919 , version 1

Cite

Clément de Chaisemartin. Trading-off Bias and Variance in Stratified Experiments and in Staggered Adoption Designs, Under a Boundedness Condition on the Magnitude of the Treatment Effect. 2022. ⟨hal-03873919⟩
9 View
16 Download

Share

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More