Child Care and Early Education Research Connections

Skip to main content

Randomization inference for treatment effect variation

Description:
Applied researchers are increasingly interested in whether and how treatment effects vary in randomized evaluations, especially variation that is not explained by observed covariates. We propose a model-free approach for testing for the presence of such unexplained variation. To use this randomization-based approach, we must address the fact that the average treatment effect, which is generally the object of interest in randomized experiments, actually acts as a nuisance parameter in this setting. We explore potential solutions and advocate for a method that guarantees valid tests in finite samples despite this nuisance. We also show how this method readily extends to testing for heterogeneity beyond a given model, which can be useful for assessing the sufficiency of a given scientific theory. We finally apply our method to the National Head Start impact study, which is a large-scale randomized evaluation of a Federal preschool programme, finding that there is indeed significant unexplained treatment effect variation. (author abstract)
Resource Type:
Reports & Papers
Country:
United States

- You May Also Like

These resources share similarities with the current selection.

Methods for modeling and decomposing treatment effect variation in large-scale randomized trials

Reports & Papers

Decomposing treatment effect variation

Reports & Papers

Using multisite experiments to study cross-site variation in treatment effects: A hybrid approach with fixed intercepts and a random treatment coefficient

Reports & Papers
Release: 'v1.61.0' | Built: 2024-04-23 23:03:38 EDT