Staggered Adoption DiD Designs with Misclassification and Anticipation

Abstract: This paper examines the identification and estimation of treatment effects in staggered adoption designs -- a common extension of the canonical Difference-in-Differences (DiD) model to multiple groups and time-periods -- in the presence of (time varying) misclassification of the treatment status as well as of anticipation. We demonstrate that standard estimators are biased with respect to commonly used causal parameters of interest under such forms of misspecification. To address this issue, we provide modified estimators that recover the Average Treatment Effect of observed and true switching units, respectively. Additionally, we suggest a testing procedure aimed at detecting the timing and extent of misclassification and anticipation effects. We illustrate the proposed methods with an application to the effects of an anti-cheating policy on school mean test scores in high stakes national exams in Indonesia.