Title: Average treatment effect estimators – inefficiency – minimisation of variance

Authors: Athanasios G. Tsagkanos

Addresses: Department of Business Administration of Food and Agricultural Enterprises, University of Ioannina, 2 G. Seferi Str. Agrinio 301 00, Greece

Abstract: In this paper, we show the inability of a recent average treatment effect estimator (ATE) to catch up the asymptotic semiparametric efficiency bound of Hahn (1998) although it minimises the mean squared error. Additionally, we propose the use of a minimum variance unbiased uniformly estimator of the propensity score in order to minimise the loss of efficiency.

Keywords: average treatment effect; ATE estimator; propensity score; minimum variance unbiased uniformly estimator; efficiency loss.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEE.2009.029149

International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics, 2009 Vol.1 No.1, pp.1 - 8

Published online: 06 Nov 2009 *

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