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Causal inference concerns not only the average effect of the treatment on the outcome but also the underlying mechanism through an intermediate variable of interest. Principal stratification characterizes such a mechanism by targeting…
Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved empirical success in various domains. One core task in DRL is distributional policy evaluation, which involves estimating the return distribution $\eta^\pi$ for a given policy $\pi$.…
Difference-in-differences (DiD) identification relies mainly on a parallel trends assumption about untreated potential outcomes. Researchers often relax this assumption by assuming conditional parallel trends within units with the same…
Pooled panel analyses often mask heterogeneity in unit-specific treatment effects. This challenge, for example, crops up in studies of the impact of democracy on economic growth, where findings vary substantially due to differences in…
Identification in a regression discontinuity (RD) research design hinges on the discontinuity in the probability of treatment when a covariate (assignment variable) exceeds a known threshold. When the assignment variable is measured with…
Difference-in-differences (DID) is one of the most widely used causal inference frameworks in observational studies. However, most existing DID methods are designed for binary treatments and cannot be readily applied to non-binary treatment…
Stepped-wedge designs are increasingly used in randomized experiments to accommodate logistical and ethical constraints by staggering treatment roll-out over time. Despite their popularity, existing analytical methods largely rely on…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a cornerstone of reinforcement learning. In the average-reward setting, standard TD($\lambda$) is highly sensitive to the choice of step-size and thus requires careful tuning to maintain numerical…
Regression discontinuity design (RDD) is widely adopted for causal inference under intervention determined by a continuous variable. While one is interested in treatment effect heterogeneity by subgroups in many applications, RDD typically…
Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is a highly prevalent and frequently underdiagnosed condition characterized by persistent, intrusive preoccupations with perceived defects in physical appearance. In this extended analysis, we employ multiple…
Drift diffusion models (DDMs) have found widespread use in computational neuroscience and other fields. They model evidence accumulation in simple decision tasks as a stochastic process drifting towards a decision barrier. In models where…
We consider the core reinforcement-learning problem of on-policy value function approximation from a batch of trajectory data, and focus on various issues of Temporal Difference (TD) learning and Monte Carlo (MC) policy evaluation. The two…
The regression discontinuity (RD) design is widely used for program evaluation with observational data. The primary focus of the existing literature has been the estimation of the local average treatment effect at the existing treatment…
This paper studies regression discontinuity designs (RDD) when linear-in-means spillovers occur between units that are close in their running variable. We show that the RDD estimand depends on the ratio of two terms: (1) the radius over…
Staggered rollout cluster randomized experiments (SR-CREs) involve sequential treatment adoption across clusters, requiring analysis methods that address a general class of dynamic causal effects, anticipation, and non-ignorable…
Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…
The external validity of regression discontinuity designs is crucial for informing policy but is rarely examined in applied work. To advance empirical practice, we propose a joint inference procedure for the treatment effect and its local…
The Difference in Difference (DiD) estimator is a popular estimator built on the "parallel trends" assumption, which is an assertion that the treatment group, absent treatment, would change "similarly" to the control group over time. To…
This paper considers the problem of design-based inference for the average treatment effect in finely stratified experiments. Here, by "design-based'' we mean that the only source of uncertainty stems from the randomness in treatment…
Empirical work often uses treatment assigned following geographic boundaries. When the effects of treatment cross over borders, classical difference-in-differences estimation produces biased estimates for the average treatment effect. In…