ebct: Using entropy balancing for continuous treatments to estimate dose–response functions and their derivatives

Abstract

Interest in evaluating dose–response functions of continuous treatments has been increasing recently. To facilitate the estimation of causal effects in this setting, I introduce the ebct command for the estimation of dose–response functions and their derivatives using entropy balancing for continuous treatments. First, balancing weights are estimated by numerically solving a globally convex optimization problem. These weights eradicate Pearson correlations between covariates and the treatment variable. Because simple uncorrelatedness may be insufficient to yield consistent estimates in the next step, higher moments of the treatment variable can be rendered uncorrelated with covariates. Second, the weights are used in local linear kernel regressions to estimate the dose–response function or its derivative. To perform statistical inference, I use a bootstrap procedure. The command also provides the option of producing publication-quality graphs for the estimated relationships.