Difference-in-Differences Estimators with Continuous Treatments and no Stayers

Author:

Clément de Chaisemartin, Xavier D'Haultfœuille, Gonzalo Vazquez-Bare

Keyword:

Economics, Econometrics, Econometrics (econ.EM)

journal:

date:

2024-02-08 00:00:00

Abstract

Many treatments or policy interventions are continuous in nature. Examples include prices, taxes or temperatures. Empirical researchers have usually relied on two-way fixed effect regressions to estimate treatment effects in such cases. However, such estimators are not robust to heterogeneous treatment effects in general; they also rely on the linearity of treatment effects. We propose estimators for continuous treatments that do not impose those restrictions, and that can be used when there are no stayers: the treatment of all units changes from one period to the next. We start by extending the nonparametric results of de Chaisemartin et al. (2023) to cases without stayers. We also present a parametric estimator, and use it to revisit Desch\^enes and Greenstone (2012).

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