Date/Time
Date(s) - 01/04/2026
11:30 am - 12:30 pm

Timothy Armstrong, Professor from the University of Southern California will present to our graduate students and faculty in KTH 334!

Tim Armstrong is Professor of Economics at USC.  His research interests are in econometrics and statistical methods.

He will be presenting,”Asymptotic Efficiency Bounds for a Class of Experimental Designs“.

Abstract

We consider an experimental design setting in which units are assigned to treatment after being sampled sequentially from an infinite population. We derive asymptotic efficiency bounds that apply to data from any experiment that assigns treatment as a (possibly randomized) function of covariates and past outcome data, including stratification on covariates and adaptive designs. For estimating the average treatment effect of a binary treatment, our results show that no further first order asymptotic efficiency improvement is possible relative to an estimator that achieves the Hahn (1998) bound in an experimental design where the propensity score is chosen to minimize this bound. Our results also apply to settings with multiple treatments with possible constraints on treatment, as well as covariate based sampling of a single outcome.

Learn more about Tim’s work and connect with him through his professional website.