Generalizing the Results from Social Experiments: Theory and Evidence from India

Abstract

How informative are treatment effects estimated in one region or time period for another region or time? In this paper, I derive bounds on the average treatment effect in a context of interest using experimental evidence from another context. The bounds are based on (1) the information identified about treatment effect heterogeneity due to unobservables in the experiment and (2) using differences in outcome distributions across contexts to learn about differences in distributions of unobservables. Empirically, using data from a pair of remedial education experiments carried out in India, I show the bounds are able to recover average treatment effects in one location using results from the other while the benchmark method cannot.