Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) refers to the average effect of a treatment or intervention on individuals who are influenced by an instrumental variable to receive the treatment. This concept is crucial when traditional methods of estimation may not yield unbiased results due to selection bias, particularly in settings where not all individuals receive the treatment. LATE captures the causal impact specifically for the subgroup of individuals whose treatment status is altered by the instrumental variable, making it a key consideration in both instrumental variables estimation and regression discontinuity analysis.
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