Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2022
Diffusion over a network refers to the phenomenon of a change of state of a cross-sectional unit in one period leading to a change of state of its neighbors in the network in the next period. One may estimate or test for diffusion by estimating a cross-sectionally aggregated correlation between neighbors over time from data. However, the estimated diffusion can be misleading if the diffusion is confounded by omitted covariates. This paper focuses on the measure of diffusion proposed by He and Song (2022, Preprint, arXiv:1812.04195v4 [stat.ME]), provides a method of decomposition analysis to measure the role of the covariates on the estimated diffusion, and develops an asymptotic inference procedure for the decomposition analysis in such a situation. This paper also presents results from a Monte Carlo study on the small sample performance of the inference procedure.
I thank Mahdi Ebrahimi Kahou for his valuable comments at the beginning of this research, and Yige Duan for excellent assistance in this research, including numerous helpful comments on this work. I also thank the Co-Editor and two anonymous referees for criticisms and suggestions. I acknowledge that this research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.