Regression-Adjusted Estimation of Quantile Treatment Effects under Covariate-Adaptive Randomizations

This paper examines regression-adjusted estimation and inference of unconditional quantile treatment effects (QTEs) under covariate-adaptive randomizations (CARs). Datasets from field experiments usually contain extra baseline covariates in addition to the strata indicators. We propose to incorporate these extra covariates via auxiliary regressions in the estimation and inference of unconditional QTEs. The auxiliary regression may be estimated parametrically, nonparametrically, or via regularization when the data are high-dimensional. Even when the auxiliary regression is misspecified, the proposed bootstrap inferential procedure still achieves the nominal rejection probability in the limit under the null for various CARs. When the auxiliary regression is correctly specified, the regression-adjusted estimator achieves the minimum asymptotic variance. We also derive the optimal pseudo true values for the potentially misspecified parametric model that minimize the asymptotic variance of the corresponding QTE estimator.

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