Related papers: Defining and Estimating Intervention Effects for G…
We study the estimation of treatment effects using samples stratified by treatment status. Standard estimators of the average treatment effect and the local average treatment effect are inconsistent in this setting. We propose consistent…
In causal inference, principal stratification is a framework for dealing with a posttreatment intermediate variable between a treatment and an outcome, in which the principal strata are defined by the joint potential values of the…
What is the ideal regression (if any) for estimating average causal effects? We study this question in the setting of discrete covariates, deriving expressions for the finite-sample variance of various stratification estimators. This…
Matching and weighting methods for observational studies involve the choice of an estimand, the causal effect with reference to a specific target population. Commonly used estimands include the average treatment effect in the treated (ATT),…
Estimating treatment effects for subgroups defined by post-treatment behavior (i.e., estimating causal effects in a principal stratification framework) can be technically challenging and heavily reliant on strong assumptions. We investigate…
Researchers are often interested in treatment effects on outcomes that are only defined conditional on a post-treatment event status. For example, in a study of the effect of different cancer treatments on quality of life at end of…
Causal evidence is needed to act and it is often enough for the evidence to point towards a direction of the effect of an action. For example, policymakers might be interested in estimating the effect of slightly increasing taxes on private…
Oversubscribed treatments are often allocated using randomized waiting lists. Applicants are ranked randomly, and treatment offers are made following that ranking until all seats are filled. To estimate causal effects, researchers often…
Principal stratification is a framework for making sense of causal effects conditioned on variables that may themselves have been affected by the treatment. For instance, in an evaluation of an educational intervention, some subjects in the…
In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…
Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects has become increasingly important in many fields and life and death decisions are now based on these estimates: for example, selecting a personalized course of medical treatment. Recently, a…
Evaluations often inform future program implementation decisions. However, the implementation context may differ, sometimes substantially, from the evaluation study context. This difference leads to uncertainty regarding the relevance of…
The propensity score is a common tool for estimating the causal effect of a binary treatment in observational data. In this setting, matching, subclassification, imputation, or inverse probability weighting on the propensity score can…
This paper shows how to use a randomized saturation experimental design to identify and estimate causal effects in the presence of spillovers--one person's treatment may affect another's outcome--and one-sided non-compliance--subjects can…
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the prediction of individualized treatment effects. While there is a rapidly growing literature on the development of such models, there is little literature on the evaluation of their…
Practitioners are interested in not only the average causal effect of the treatment on the outcome but also the underlying causal mechanism in the presence of an intermediate variable between the treatment and outcome. However, in many…
Prediction models developed before the introduction of a new treatment may be used to estimate treatment effects of newly introduced treatments. One approach, known as model-based clinical evaluation in radiotherapy, does this by comparing…
When evaluating the efficacy of social programs and medical treatments using randomized experiments, the estimated overall average causal effect alone is often of limited value and the researchers must investigate when the treatments do and…
Principal stratification is a popular framework for causal inference in the presence of an intermediate outcome. While the principal average treatment effects are the standard target of inference, they may be insufficient when interest lies…
Mediation analysis is a strategy for understanding the mechanisms by which treatments or interventions affect later outcomes. Mediation analysis is frequently applied in randomized trial settings, but typically assumes: a) that randomized…