Testing for covariate balance using quantile regression and resampling methods

Consistency of propensity score matching estimators hinges on the propensity score's ability to balance the distributions of covariates in the pools of treated and non-treated units. Conventional balance tests merely check for differences in covariates’ means, but cannot account for differences in higher moments. For this reason, this paper proposes balance tests which test for differences in the entire distributions of continuous covariates based on quantile regression (to derive Kolmogorov--Smirnov and Cramer--von-Mises--Smirnov-type test statistics) and resampling methods (for inference). Simulations suggest that these methods are very powerful and capture imbalances related to higher moments when conventional balance tests fail to do so.