Identification and Semiparametric Estimation of Conditional Means from Aggregate Data (opens in new tab)

We introduce a new method for estimating the mean of an outcome variable within groups when researchers only observe the average of the outcome and group indicators across a set of aggregation units, such as geographical areas. Existing methods for this problem, also known as ecological inference, implicitly make strong assumptions about the aggregation process. We first formalize weaker conditions for identification which hold conditionally...