Inference in Differences-in-Differences with Few Treated Groups and Heteroskedasticity

Abstract

We derive an inference method that works in differences-in-differences settings with few treated and many control groups in the presence of heteroskedasticity. As a leading example, we provide theoretical justification and empirical evidence that heteroskedasticity generated by variation in group sizes can invalidate existing inference methods, even in data sets with a large number of observations per group. In contrast, our inference method remains valid in this case. Our test can also be combined with feasible generalized least squares, providing a safeguard against misspecification of the serial correlation.