Part V · Robustness & Production Deployment

Module 13. Network Interference & Spillover Effects

When one unit's treatment affects another, separate direct from spillover effects and design for both.

Agriculture: fertiliser adoption spillovers; weather-insurance networks about 6 hours3 lessons

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Lessons

When SUTVA Fails: Spillovers and Exposure Mappings

· Recognise interference between units in health, agriculture, education and labour markets
· Simulate a farmer network where treatment spills over to neighbours
· Define an exposure mapping and separate direct from spillover effects

· Explain partial interference: spillovers within clusters but not between them
· Analyse a randomised saturation design with pure-control clusters
· Estimate the direct effect, the spillover on the untreated, and the total effect at each saturation

· Analyse a real field experiment on information diffusion (Cai, de Janvry and Sadoulet, 2015)
· Estimate how friends' decisions relate to a farmer's own insurance take-up
· Explain Manski's reflection problem and why peer correlations are not automatically causal