Heterogeneity Analysis with Heterogeneous Treatments

EI Seminar
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Analysis of effect heterogeneity at the group level is standard practice in empirical treatment evaluation research. However, treatments analyzed are often aggregates of multiple underlying treatments which are themselves heterogeneous, e.g. different modules of a training program or varying exposures. In these settings, conventional approaches such as comparing (adjusted) differences-in-means across groups can produce misleading conclusions when underlying treatment propensities differ systematically between groups.

Speaker
Philip Heiler
Date
Thursday 4 Sep 2025, 12:00 - 13:00
Type
Seminar
Room
ET-14
Location
Campus Woudestein
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With Michael C. Knaus

This paper develops a novel decomposition framework that disentangles contributions of effect heterogeneity and qualitatively distinct components of treatment heterogeneity to observed group-level differences. We propose semiparametric debiased machine learning estimators that are robust to complex treatments and limited overlap. We revisit a widely documented gender gap in training returns of an active labor market policy. The decomposition reveals that it is almost entirely driven by women being treated differently than men and not by heterogeneous returns from identical treatments. In particular, women are disproportionately targeted towards vocational training tracks with lower unconditional returns. 

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Full paper

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

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