Transporting treatment effects from difference-in-differences studies

Abstract: Difference-in-differences (DID) is a popular approach to identify the causal effects of treatments and policies in the presence of unmeasured confounding. DID identifies the sample average treatment effect in the treated (SATT). However, a goal of such research is often to inform decision-making in target populations outside the treated sample. Transportability methods have been developed to extend inferences from study samples to external target populations; these methods have primarily been developed and applied in settings where identification is based on conditional independence between the treatment and potential outcomes, such as in a randomized trial. We present a novel approach to identifying and estimating effects in a target population, based on DID conducted in a study sample that differs from the target population. We present a range of assumptions under which one may identify causal effects in the target population and employ causal diagrams to illustrate these assumptions. In most realistic settings, results depend critically on the assumption that any unmeasured confounders are not effect measure modifiers on the scale of the effect of interest (e.g., risk difference, odds ratio). We develop several estimators of transported effects, including g-computation, inverse odds weighting, and a doubly robust estimator based on the efficient influence function. Simulation results support theoretical properties of the proposed estimators. As an example, we apply our approach to study the effects of a 2018 US federal smoke-free public housing law on air quality in public housing across the US, using data from a DID study conducted in New York City alone.