Estimation of complier expected shortfall treatment effects with a binary instrumental variable

Abstract

Estimating the causal effect of a treatment or exposure for a subpopulation is of great interest in many biomedical and economical studies. Expected shortfall, also referred to as the super-quantile, is an attractive effect-size measure that can accommodate data heterogeneity and aggregate local information of effect over a certain region of interest of the outcome distribution. In this article, we propose the ComplieRExpected Shortfall Treatment Effect (CRESTE) model under an instrumental variable framework to quantity the CRESTE for a binary endogenous treatment variable. By utilizing the special characteristics of a binary instrumental variable and a specific formulation of Neyman-orthogonalization, we propose a two-step estimation procedure, which can be implemented by simply solving weighted least-squares regression and weighted quantile regression with estimated weights. We develop the asymptotic properties for the proposed estimator and use numerical simulations to confirm its validity and robust finite-sample performance. An illustrative analysis of a National Job Training Partnership Act study is presented to show the practical utility of the proposed method.