A Toolkit for the Study of Treatment-Effect Discontinuities

Alessandro Baldi Antognini; Paolo Verme

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arXiv · 2606.28017

A Toolkit for the Study of Treatment-Effect Discontinuities

Alessandro Baldi Antognini·Paolo Verme

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Abstract

This paper provides a toolkit for the study of distributional treatment effects (DTEs) focused on treatment-effect discontinuities defined as points where marginal distributional effects change sign. Building on the Treatment Effects Curve (TEC, Verme, 2010), the paper makes three contributions. First, we propose a methodological framework comprising a Horizontal Discontinuity Analysis (HDA) comparing groups in regions of opposite-signed effects using causal forests, and a Vertical Discontinuity Analysis (VDA) examining sign-switch points. Second, we adapt crossing-point asymptotics to locate where a TEC crosses zero and to test the non-tangentiality of its local slope with a bias-corrected Wald statistic. Third, we illustrate the full workflow on synthetic data and add a diagnostic application to Mexico's PROGRESA data. The paper shows how these contributions complement and expand existing instruments for DTE analyses.

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Alessandro Baldi Antognini, Paolo Verme. 2026-06-26. A Toolkit for the Study of Treatment-Effect Discontinuities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.28017

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