“Doing More When You’re Running LATE: Applying Marginal Treatment Effect Methods to Examine Treatment Effect Heterogeneity in Experiments” with Amanda Kowalski, Yale

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS WORKSHOP

Abstract: I examine treatment effect heterogeneity within an experiment to inform external validity. The local average treatment effect (LATE) gives an average treatment effect for compliers. I bound and estimate average treatment effects for always takers and never takers by extending marginal treatment effect methods. I use these methods to separate selection from treatment effect heterogeneity, generalizing the comparison of OLS to LATE. Applying these methods to the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, I find that the treatment effect of insurance on emergency room utilization decreases from always takers to compliers to never takers. Previous utilization explains a large share of the treatment effect heterogeneity. Extrapolations show that other expansions could increase or decrease utilization.

Speaker: Amanda Kowalski, Associate Professor of Economics at the Yale University Department of Economics and Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), is a health economist who specializes in bringing together theoretical models and econometric techniques to answer questions that inform current debates in health policy. Professor Kowalski’s recent research advances methods available to analyze data from experiments.

This workshop series is being sponsored by the ISPS Center for the Study of American Politics and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.