Spillovers of Program Benefits with Missing Network Links

Abstract

The issue of missing network links in partially observed networks is frequently neglected in empirical studies. This paper addresses this issue when investigating the spillovers of program benefits in the presence of network interactions. Our method is flexible enough to account for non-i.i.d. missing links. It relies on two network measures that can be easily constructed based on the incoming and outgoing links of the same observed network. The treatment and spillover effects can be point identified and consistently estimated if network degrees are bounded for all units. We also demonstrate the bias reduction property of our method if network degrees of some units are unbounded. Monte Carlo experiments and a naturalistic simulation on real-world network data are implemented to verify the finite-sample performance of our method. We also re-examine the spillover effects of home computer use on children's self-empowered learning.