IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2608.13466.html

Learning about Treatment Effects in Panels under Unknown Interference

Author

Listed:
  • Shengbin Wei

Abstract

When comparison units may also respond to treatment, panel comparisons reflect both the treatment effect and spillovers. If the interference pattern is unknown, observed outcomes alone do not separate the two. I characterize what can nevertheless be learned from panel outcomes under general restrictions, without requiring an exposure mapping or prior classification of affected donors. The framework scales validity bounds for every convex donor weight by its fit before treatment and combines these bounds with prespecified restrictions tailored to the application. The validity bounds constrain the treatment effect relative to spillovers, while the additional restrictions determine its possible values. Together these restrictions yield a sharp identified set. When the additional restrictions have a finite linear representation, checking whether a proposed treatment effect is compatible with the model reduces exactly to asking whether a finite linear system has a solution. Bootstrap calibration tests this condition. Inverting these tests uniformly controls, in large samples, the probability of falsely excluding each compatible value. In an application to the Legal Arizona Workers Act, the resulting 95 percent inversion sets contain effects of both signs across all reported specifications, leaving the sign of the treatment effect unresolved.

Suggested Citation

  • Shengbin Wei, 2026. "Learning about Treatment Effects in Panels under Unknown Interference," Papers 2608.13466, arXiv.org.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2608.13466
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.13466
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2608.13466. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.