Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Nov, 2018, Volume 86, Issue 6

Identifying Effects of Multivalued Treatments

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA14269
p. 1939-1963

Sokbae Lee, Bernard Salanié

Multivalued treatment models have typically been studied under restrictive assumptions: ordered choice, and more recently, unordered monotonicity. We show how treatment effects can be identified in a more general class of models that allows for multidimensional unobserved heterogeneity. Our results rely on two main assumptions: treatment assignment must be a measurable function of threshold‐crossing rules, and enough continuous instruments must be available. We illustrate our approach for several classes of models.


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Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Identifying Effects of Multivalued Treatments"

Appendix A gives an identification result for the zero-index case, which was not dealt with in the text. It also provides a characterization of Heckman and Pinto's unordered monotonicity property as a subcase of our more general framework. Appendix B collects proofs of some of the results in the main text. Finally, Appendix C fills in the details of the entry game introduced in Section 2, and Appendix D compares our results with those of Heckman, Urzua, and Vytlacil (2008) in more detail. Appendix E discusses a more general form of threshold conditions than the "rectangular"
threshold conditions in Assumption 2.1.