Modeling the distribution of site level effects is an important problem, but it is also an incredibly difficult one. Current methods rely on distributional assumptions in multilevel models for estimation. There it is hoped that the partial pooling of site level estimates with overall estimates, designed to take into account individual variation as…

The goal of this study is to better understand how methods for estimating treatment effects of latent groups operate. In particular, the authors identify where violations of assumptions can lead to biased estimates, and explore how covariates can be critical in the estimation process. For each set of approaches, the authors first review the…