Matching Estimators of Causal Effects in Clustered Observational Studies with Application to Quantifying the Impact of Marine Protected Areas on Biodiversity

TL;DR

This paper develops a matching estimator for causal effects in clustered observational studies, specifically applied to assess the impact of marine protected area policies on fish biodiversity, providing theoretical guarantees and practical recommendations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel matching estimator for clustered data, with theoretical validation and a bootstrap variance method, applied to marine conservation policy evaluation.

Findings

No-take MPA policy is more effective than multi-use policy in preserving biodiversity.

The proposed matching method reduces bias and achieves proper confidence interval coverage.

Theoretical guarantees support the estimator's validity in clustered observational studies.

Abstract

Marine conservation preserves fish biodiversity, protects marine and coastal ecosystems, and supports climate resilience and adaptation. Despite the importance of establishing marine protected areas (MPAs), research on the effectiveness of MPAs with different conservation policies is limited due to the lack of quantitative MPA information. In this paper, leveraging a global MPA database, we investigate the causal impact of MPA policies on fish biodiversity. To address challenges posed by this clustered and confounded observational study, we construct a matching estimator of the average treatment effect and a cluster-weighted bootstrap method for variance estimation. We establish the theoretical guarantees of the matching estimator and its variance estimator. Under our proposed matching framework, we recommend matching on both cluster-level and unit-level covariates to achieve efficiency. The simulation results demonstrate that our matching strategy minimizes the bias and achieves the nominal confidence interval coverage. Applying our proposed matching method to compare different MPA policies reveals that the no-take policy is more effective than the multi-use policy in preserving fish biodiversity.