Identification of causal policy effects for spatial exposure fields

Abstract

Many interventions act on an entire spatial exposure field. We study when their induced laws satisfy policy positivity and what its failure implies for causal evaluation through weighting and structural modelling. We show that, for post-transformation fields that are Gaussian, the only admissible translation that satisfy positivity lie on the Cameron-Martin space of the observed exposure field. Under fine-scale variation and regularity assumptions, these are the only admissible non-decreasing pointwise policies on that scale. Common rules, including binding caps and proportional reductions on the Gaussian scale can therefore violate positivity. The Cameron-Martin norm controls both weight variability and the amplification of disagreement between candidate outcome models into disagreement between policy estimates. Without positivity, bounded continuous response models can make arbitrarily similar observational predictions while their policy estimates remain separated. We also give a policy-specific criterion for structural identification conditional on a realised exposure state. Finally, when a policy violating positivity admits weights in every finite representation, their second moments diverge under nested refinement that recovers the full field. These results motivate assessing identification and sensitivity for the specified policy effect across plausible structural models and under refinement of finite representations.