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Article
Implementing Propensity Score Matching with Network Data: The effect of GATT on bilateral trade
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (2017)
  • Luca De Benedictis
  • Bruno Arpino, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
  • Alessandra Mattei, University of Florence
Abstract
Motivated by the evaluation of the causal effect of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on bilateral international trade flows, we investigate the role of network structure in propensity score matching under the assumption of strong ignorability. We study the sensitivity of causal inference with respect to the presence of characteristics of the network in the set of confounders conditional on which strong ignorability is assumed to hold. We find that estimates of the average causal effect are highly sensitive to the presence of node-level network statistics in the set of confounders. Therefore, we argue that estimates may suffer from omitted variable bias when the network information is ignored, at least in our application.
Keywords
  • Centrality; Clustering; GATT; Matching; Networks; Trade; Unconfoundedness
Publication Date
Winter April, 2017
Citation Information
Luca De Benedictis, Bruno Arpino and Alessandra Mattei. "Implementing Propensity Score Matching with Network Data: The effect of GATT on bilateral trade" Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (2017)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/luca_de_benedictis/40/