Inference on Heterogeneous Quantile Treatment Effects via Rank-Score Balancing

Understanding treatment effect heterogeneity in observational studies is of great practical importance to many scientific fields because the same treatment may affect different individuals differently. Quantile regression provides a natural framework for modeling such heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a new method for inference on heterogeneous quantile treatment effects that incorporates high-dimensional covariates. Our estimator combines a debiased $\ell_1$-penalized regression adjustment with a quantile-specific covariate balancing scheme. We present a comprehensive study of the theoretical properties of this estimator, including weak convergence of the heterogeneous quantile treatment effect process to the sum of two independent, centered Gaussian processes. We illustrate the finite-sample performance of our approach through Monte Carlo experiments and an empirical example, dealing with the differential effect of mothers' education on infant birth weights.