An Equivalence Approach to Balance and Placebo Tests
Name
hartman_hidalgo_equivalence.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
537.08 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e6d1d12ac2f579c4a36500ffa22a4d34
Author(s)
Hartman, Erin
Hidalgo, Fernando Daniel
Date Issued
September 2018
Journal
American Journal of Political Science
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Hartman, Erin and F. Daniel Hidalgo. "An Equivalence Approach to Balance and Placebo Tests." American Journal of Political Science 62, 4 (September 2018): 1000-1013 © 2018 Midwest Political Science Association
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Recent emphasis on credible causal designs has led to the expectation that scholars justify their research designs by testing the plausibility of their causal identification assumptions, often through balance and placebo tests. Yet current practice is to use statistical tests with an inappropriate null hypothesis of no difference, which can result in equating nonsignificant differences with significant homogeneity. Instead, we argue that researchers should begin with the initial hypothesis that the data are inconsistent with a valid research design, and provide sufficient statistical evidence in favor of a valid design. When tests are correctly specified so that difference is the null and equivalence is the alternative, the problems afflicting traditional tests are alleviated. We argue that equivalence tests are better able to incorporate substantive considerations about what constitutes good balance on covariates and placebo outcomes than traditional tests. We demonstrate these advantages with applications to natural experiments.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12387
