Randomization Inference for Dynamic Causal Effects in Short Panels with Autoregressive Instruments

I study randomization inference for dynamic causal effects in panels with many units and few periods when treatment is endogenous and an instrument is as good as randomly assigned only through the innovations of a first-order autoregressive assignment mechanism with unknown persistence. The persistence is a nuisance parameter in two senses: it determines which weighted average of heterogeneous causal effects the instrumented local projection estimand measures, and it governs the randomization distribution of any statistic built from the instrument. I propose tests that never estimate it. For each candidate value the innovations are recovered, rerandomized under a group that leaves their joint law invariant, and a randomization p-value is formed; the reported p-value is the supremum over candidate values or over an exact confidence set. Under a sharp null on the path of lag-specific effects the tests have level at most $\alpha$ for every persistence in finite samples, including the unit root, and the supremum is a maximum over finitely many points. Under a weak null on the heterogeneity-weighted estimand a studentized version is uniformly asymptotically valid.