DiSCoTEA {DiSCos}

Aggregate treatment effects from DiSCo function.

Description

Function to aggregate treatment effects from the output of the DiSCo function, plot the distribution of the aggregation statistic over time, and report summary tables.

Usage

DiSCoTEA(
  disco,
  agg = "quantileDiff",
  graph = TRUE,
  t_plot = NULL,
  savePlots = FALSE,
  xlim = NULL,
  ylim = NULL,
  samples = c(0.25, 0.5, 0.75)
)

Arguments

disco

Output of the DiSCo function.

agg

String indicating the aggregation statistic to be used. Options include

• quantileDiff Difference in quantiles between the target and the weighted average of the controls.

• quantile Plots both the observed and the counterfactual quantile functions. No summary statistics will be produced.

• cdfDiff Difference in CDFs between the target and the weighted average of the controls.

• cdf Plots both the observed and the counterfactual CDFs. No summary statistics will be produced.

graph

Boolean indicating whether to plot graphs (default is TRUE).

t_plot

Optional vector of time periods (t_col values in the original dataframe) to be plotted (default is NULL, which plots all time periods).

savePlots

Boolean indicating whether to save the plots to the current working directory (default is FALSE). The plot names will be ⁠[agg]_[start_year]_[end_year].pdf⁠.

xlim

Optional vector of length 2 indicating the x-axis limits of the plot. Useful for zooming in on relevant parts of the distribution for fat-tailed distributions.

ylim

Optional vector of length 2 indicating the y-axis limits of the plot.

samples

Numeric vector indicating the range of quantiles of the aggregation statistic (agg) to be summarized in the summary property of the S3 class returned by the function (default is c(0.25, 0.5, 0.75)). For example, if samples = c(0.25, 0.5, 0.75), the summary table will include the average effect for the 0-25th, 25-50th, 50-75th and 75-100th quantiles of the distribution of the aggregation statistic over time.

Details

This function takes in the output of the DiSCo_per function and computes aggregate treatment effect using a user-specified aggregation statistic. The default is the differences between the counterfactual and the observed quantile functions (quantileDiff). If graph is set to TRUE, the function will plot the distribution of the aggregation statistic over time. The S3 class returned by the function has a summary property that will print a selection of aggregated effects (specified by the samples parameter) for the chosen agg method, by post-treatment year (see examples below). This summary call will only print effects if the agg parameter requested a distribution difference (quantileDiff or cdfDiff). The other aggregations are meant to be inspected visually. If the permutation parameter was set to TRUE in the original DiSCo call, the summary table will include the results of the permutation test. If the original DiSCo call was restricted to a range of quantiles smaller than ⁠[0,1]⁠ (i.e. q_min > 0 or q_max < 1), the samples parameter is ignored and only the aggregated differences for the quantile range specified in the original call are returned.

Value

A DiSCoT object, which is an S3 class that stores a list of treatment effects, their standard errors, the corresponding confidence intervals (if specified), and a dataframe with treatment effects aggregated according to the agg input. The S3 class also has a summary property that will print a selection of aggregated effects (specified by the samples parameter) for the chosen agg method, by post-treatment year, as well as the permutation test results, if specified.