Estimating Causal Effects of Discrete and Continuous Treatments with Binary Instruments

EI Seminar
Aerial view of Erasmus Building with the walk way saying 'Creating positive societal impact the Erasmian way''

We propose an instrumental variable framework for identifying and estimating causal effects of discrete and continuous treatments with binary instruments. The basis of our approach is a local copula representation of the joint distribution of the potential outcomes and unobservables determining treatment assignment.

Speaker
Iván Fernández-Val
Date
Thursday 4 Jun 2026, 12:00 - 13:00
Type
Seminar
Room
ET-14
Location
Campus Woudestein
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This representation allows us to introduce an identifying assumption, so-called copula invariance, that restricts the local dependence of the copula with respect to the treatment propensity. We show that copula invariance identifies treatment effects for the entire population and other subpopulations such as the treated. 

The identification results are constructive and lead to practical estimation and inference procedures based on distribution regression. An application to estimating the effect of sleep on well-being uncovers interesting patterns of heterogeneity.

See also

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More information

Do you want to know more about the event? Contact the secretariat Econometrics at eb-secr@ese.eur.nl.

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