Dehejia, Rajeev. <br/><br/>
From Local to Global:  External Validity in a Fertility Natural Experiment / 
Rajeev Dehejia, Cristian Pop-Eleches, Cyrus Samii. 
 - Cambridge, Mass.  National Bureau of Economic Research  2015. 
 - 1 online resource:  illustrations (black and white); 
 - NBER working paper series  no. w21459 .
 - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)  no. w21459. .
<br/><br/> August 2015. 
<br/><br/> We study issues related to external validity for treatment effects using over 100 replications of the Angrist and Evans (1998) natural experiment on the effects of sibling sex composition on fertility and labor supply. The replications are based on census data from around the world going back to 1960. We decompose sources of error in predicting treatment effects in external contexts in terms of macro and micro sources of variation. In our empirical setting, we find that macro covariates dominate over micro covariates for reducing errors in predicting treatments, an issue that past studies of external validity have been unable to evaluate. We develop methods for two applications to evidence-based decision-making, including determining where to locate an experiment and whether policy-makers should commission new experiments or rely on an existing evidence base for making a policy decision. 
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