Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Motivated by the evaluation of the causal effect of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on bilateral international trade flows, we investigate the role of network structure in propensity score matching under the assumption of strong ignorability. We study the sensitivity of causal inference with respect to the presence of characteristics of the network in the set of confounders conditional on which strong ignorability is assumed to hold. We find that estimates of the average causal effect are highly sensitive to the presence of node-level network statistics in the set of confounders. Therefore, we argue that estimates may suffer …

The purpose of this work is to evaluate the causal effect of the Network of the Cobden-Chevalier Treaties including the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) clause on trade flows of countries in the second half of the 19th century. This paper contributes to the literature on the topic in several ways. First, it applies up-to-date quantitative methods (i.e., nonparametric matching technique) to the study of historical phenomena. These methods permit to estimate the average MFN effect (the ``treatment") on the treated group of countries in terms of bilateral trade flows (the ``outcome"), rebalancing the control group without imposing any functional relationship …