On Quantile Treatment Effects, Rank Similarity, and Variation of Instrumental Variables

Abstract

This paper investigates how certain relationship between observed and counterfactual distributions serves as an identifying condition for treatment effects when the treatment is endogenous, and shows that this condition holds in a range of nonparametric models for treatment effects. To this end, we first provide a novel characterization of the prevalent assumption restricting treatment heterogeneity in the literature, namely rank similarity. Our characterization demonstrates the stringency of this assumption and allows us to relax it in an economically meaningful way, resulting in our identifying condition. It also justifies the quest of richer exogenous variations in the data (e.g., multi-valued or multiple instrumental variables) in exchange for weaker identifying conditions. The primary goal of this investigation is to provide empirical researchers with tools that are robust and easy to implement but still yield tight policy evaluations.