Instrumental Variables for Binary Treatments with Heterogenous Treatment Effects: A Simple Exposition
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Alan Manning
This note provides a simple exposition of what IV can and cannot estimate in a model with binary treatment variable and heterogenous treatment effects. It shows how linear IV is essentially a misspecification of functional form and the reason why linear IV estimates will generally depend on the instrument used is because of this misspecification. It shows that if one can estimate the correct functional form then the treatment effects are independent of the instruments used. However, the data may not be rich enough in practice to be able to identify these treatments effects without strong distributional assumptions. In this case, one will have to settle for estimations of treatment effects that are instrument-dependent.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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- Willingness to Pay for Environmental Quality: Testable Empirical Implications of the Growth and Environment Literature: Comment
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- Do Parents Value Changes in Test Scores? High Stakes Testing in Texas
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