Good Controls Gone Bad: Difference-in-Differences with Covariates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper introduces the two-way common causal covariates (CCC) assumption, which is necessary to get an unbiased estimate of the ATT when using time-varying covariates in existing Difference-in-Differences methods. The two-way CCC assumption implies that the effect of the covariates remain the same between groups and across time periods. This assumption has been implied in previous literature, but has not been explicitly addressed. Through theoretical proofs and a Monte Carlo simulation study, we show that the standard TWFE and the CS-DID estimators are biased when the two-way CCC assumption is violated. We propose a new estimator called the Intersection Difference-in-differences (DID-INT) which can provide an unbiased estimate of the ATT under two-way CCC violations. DID-INT can also identify the ATT under heterogeneous treatment effects and with staggered treatment rollout. The estimator relies on parallel trends of the residuals of the outcome variable, after appropriately adjusting for covariates. This covariate residualization can recover parallel trends that are hidden with conventional estimators.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".