论文标题
边缘介入效应
Marginal Interventional Effects
论文作者
论文摘要
常规的因果估计值,例如平均治疗效果(ATE),反映出如果所有单位接受治疗与对照组,人群中的平均结果或亚群的平均结果将如何变化。但是,现实世界中的政策变化通常是渐进的,它只会改变一小部分人群或接近“参与余地”的治疗状况。为了捕捉这一概念,在经济学以及统计和流行病学中发展了两条平行的探究线,这些探究定义,识别和估计我们称之为介入的效果。在本文中,我们通过将介入效应(IE)定义为治疗干预对感兴趣结果的人均影响和边际干预效果(MIE)作为其限制,当干预的大小接近零时,我们将这两条文献桥梁桥接。 IE和MIE可以被视为与经济学文献中提出的相关政策治疗效果(PRTE)和边际PRTE(MPRTE)的无条件对应物。但是,与PRTE和MPRTE不同,IE和MIE不同的定义而无需参考潜在索引模型,正如我们所表明的,可以在不满意的情况下或通过使用仪器变量来识别。对于这两种情况,我们都表明,MIES通常在没有强大的ATE所需的强阳性假设的情况下鉴定出来,突出显示了几种在政策分析中可能特别感兴趣的“风格化干预措施”,讨论了几种参数和半疗法估计策略,并用经验性的例子说明了所提出的方法。
Conventional causal estimands, such as the average treatment effect (ATE), reflect how the mean outcome in a population or subpopulation would change if all units received treatment versus control. Real-world policy changes, however, are often incremental, changing the treatment status for only a small segment of the population who are at or near "the margin of participation." To capture this notion, two parallel lines of inquiry have developed in economics and in statistics and epidemiology that define, identify, and estimate what we call interventional effects. In this article, we bridge these two strands of literature by defining interventional effect (IE) as the per capita effect of a treatment intervention on an outcome of interest, and marginal interventional effect (MIE) as its limit when the size of the intervention approaches zero. The IE and MIE can be viewed as the unconditional counterparts of the policy-relevant treatment effect (PRTE) and marginal PRTE (MPRTE) proposed in the economics literature. However, different from PRTE and MPRTE, IE and MIE are defined without reference to a latent index model, and, as we show, can be identified either under unconfoundedness or through the use of instrumental variables. For both scenarios, we show that MIEs are typically identified without the strong positivity assumption required of the ATE, highlight several "stylized interventions" that may be of particular interest in policy analysis, discuss several parametric and semiparametric estimation strategies, and illustrate the proposed methods with an empirical example.