Testing Full Mediation of Treatment Effects and the Identifiability of Causal Mechanisms
Researchers have developed a new statistical test to determine if the effect of a treatment is entirely mediated by observed intermediate outcomes. The test also assesses whether the causal mechanisms driving these effects can be identified. Their framework, which utilizes double machine learning for implementation, is shown to be root-n consistent and asymptotically normal under certain conditions and has been validated through simulations and empirical applications. AI