From Local to Global: External Validity in a Fertility Natural Experiment
By Rajeev Dehejia, Cristian Pop-Eleches, Cyrus Samii. Journal of business & economic statistics, 2015
97 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract We study issues related to external validity for treatment effects using over 100 replications of the Angrist and Evans natural experiment on the effects of sibling sex composition on fertility and labor supply. The replications are based on census data from around the world going back to 1960. We decompose sources of error in predicting treatment effects in external contexts in terms of macro and micro sources of variation. In our empirical setting, we find that macro covariates dominate over micro covariates for reducing errors in predicting treatments, an issue that past studies of external validity have been unable to evaluate. We develop methods for two applications to evidence-based decision-making, including determining where to locate an experiment and whether policy-makers should commission new experiments or rely on an existing evidence base for making a policy decision.
Subfields: Gender Studies, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a5a0143601d94df087ac14d7ea135a9d68eddab1
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Citations in the corpus
- Field experiments across the social sciences (2017, background): “Responding to such concerns about the external validity of field experimental results, recent work is developing statistical tools for the extrapolation of locally valid results to other populations and places (e.g., Dehejia et al. 2015).”
- Age of Marriage, Weather Shocks, and the Direction of Marriage Payments (2020, background): “Our findings emphasize the value of replicating empirical and experimental analyses in different environments and highlight the role of cultural norms as variables that may be relevant for extrapolation (Dehejia, Pop-Eleches, and Samii, 2019).”