Estimating Heterogeneous Impacts with Endogenous Participation and Non-Compliance
This paper considers the estimation of heterogeneous impacts within a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) in a situation where heterogeneous status is endogenous and is not fully observed in the control sample. We show how to use information in the treatment sample and a noisy signal on the heterogeneous status to estimate meaningful impacts under a minimal set of assumptions. We provide an application of this approach to a data set from Ghana, collected around a clustered RCT to evaluate the impacts of an early-years intervention, differentiating the impact between households that participate actively in the program from those who participate only passively, as recipients. We show that, for some outcomes, the properly estimated heterogeneous impacts differ substantially from those computed with a naive estimator.
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Copy CitationOrazio Attanasio, Lina Cardona-Sosa, and Ziqian Liu, "Estimating Heterogeneous Impacts with Endogenous Participation and Non-Compliance," NBER Working Paper 35872 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35872.Download Citation
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