No abstract

Many empirical studies leverage shift-share (or "Bartik") instruments that average a set of observed shocks with shock exposure weights. We derive a necessary and sufficient shock-level orthogonality condition for these instruments to identify causal effects. We then show that orthogonality holds when observed shocks are as-good-as-randomly assigned and growing in number, with the average shock exposure sufficiently dispersed. Quasiexperimental shift-share designs may be implemented with new shock-level procedures, which help visualize the identifying variation, correct standard errors, choose appropriate specifications, test identifying assumptions, and optimally combine multiple sets of quasi-random shocks. We illustrate these ideas by revisiting Autor et al. (2013)'s analysis of the labor market effects of Chinese import competition.

A broad empirical literature uses "event study," or "difference-in-differences with staggered rollout," research designs for treatment effect estimation: settings in which units in the panel receive treatment at different times. We show a series of problems with conventional regressionbased two-way fixed effects estimators, both static and dynamic. These problems arise when researchers conflate the identifying assumptions of parallel trends and no anticipatory effects, implicit assumptions that restrict treatment effect heterogeneity, and the specification of the estimand as a weighted average of treatment effects. We then derive the efficient estimator robust to treatment effect heterogeneity for this setting, show that it has a particularly intuitive "imputation" form when treatment-effect heterogeneity is unrestricted, characterize its asymptotic behavior, provide tools for inference, and illustrate its attractive properties in simulations. We further discuss appropriate tests for parallel trends, and show how our estimation approach extends to many settings beyond standard event studies.

Many studies use shift-share (or “Bartik”) instruments, which average a set of shocks with exposure share weights. We provide a new econometric framework for shift-share instrumental variable (SSIV) regressions in which identification follows from the quasi-random assignment of shocks, while exposure shares are allowed to be endogenous. The framework is motivated by an equivalence result: the orthogonality between a shift-share instrument and an unobserved residual can be represented as the orthogonality between the underlying shocks and a shock-level unobservable. SSIV regression coefficients can similarly be obtained from an equivalent shock-level regression, motivating shock-level conditions for their consistency. We discuss and illustrate several practical insights of this framework in the setting of Autor et al. (2013), estimating the effect of Chinese import competition on manufacturing employment across U.S. commuting zones.