Marginal treatment effects in difference-in-differences settings with staggered adoption

• Grant number: 22/13229-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: August 01, 2023
• End date: April 30, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Economics - Quantitative Methods Applied to Economics
• Principal Investigator: Cristine Campos de Xavier Pinto
• Grantee: Pedro Picchetti
• Supervisor: Jonathan Roth
• Host Institution: Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa (Insper). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Brown University, United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/13708-8 - Marginal treatment effects in difference-in-differences, BP.DD

Abstract

Difference-in-Differences (DiD) is a popular method used to evaluate the effect of a treatment. In its most simple version, a control group remains untreated at two periods, whereas the treatment group becomes fully treated at the second period. However, it is not uncommon in applications of the method that (i) there are multiple time periods, (ii) the timing of treatment varies across groups and (iii) the treatment rate only increases in the treatment groups at the time of treatment. In this project we provide identification results for the marginal treatment effect (MTE) in such fuzzy designs with staggered adoption. We intend to build consistent estimators for the MTE and to provide an empirical application of the method by investigating the effects of ethanol fuel availability on the sales of flexible-fuel vehicles. (AU)