Comparison of Covariate Balance Weighting Methods in Estimating Treatment Effects

Different covariate balance weighting methods have been proposed by researchers from different perspectives to estimate the treatment effects.This paper gives a brief review of the covariate balancing propensity score method by Imai and Ratkovic(2014),the stable balance weighting procedure by Zubizarreta(2015),the calibration balance weighting approach by Chan,et al.(2016),and the integrated propensity score technique by Sant’Anna,et al.(2020).Simulations are conducted to illustrate the finite sample performance of both the average treatment effect and quantile treatment effect estimators based on different weighting methods.Simulation results show that in general,the covariate balance weighting methods can outperform the conventional maximum likelihood estimation method while the performance of the four covariate balance weighting methods varies with the data generating processes.Finally,the four covariate balance weighting methods are applied to estimate the treatment effects of the college graduate on personal annual income.