Estimation of Multivalued Treatment Effects under Conditional Independence

Abstract

This article discusses the poparms command, which implements two semiparametric estimators for multivalued treatment effects discussed in Cattaneo (2010, Journal of Econometrics 155: 138–154). The first is a properly reweighted inverse-probability weighted estimator, and the second is an efficient-influence-function estimator, which can be interpreted as having the double-robust property. Our implementation jointly estimates means and quantiles of the potential-outcome distributions, allowing for multiple, discrete treatment levels. These estimators are then used to estimate a variety of multivalued treatment effects. We discuss pre- and postestimation approaches that can be used in conjunction with our main implementation. We illustrate the program and provide a simulation study assessing the finite-sample performance of the inference procedures.