Equality-minded treatment choice

主讲人

Toru Kitagawa

简介

<p>The goal of many randomized experiments and quasi-experimental studies in economics is to inform policies that aim to raise incomes and reduce economic inequality. A policy maximizing the sum of individual incomes may not be desirable if it magnifies economic inequality and post-treatment redistribution of income is infeasible. This paper develops a method to estimate the optimal treatment assignment policy based on observable individual covariates when the policy objective is to maximize an equality-minded rank-dependent social welfare function, which puts higher weight on individuals with lower-ranked outcomes. We estimate the optimal policy by maximizing a sample analog of the rank-dependent welfare over a properly constrained set of policies. Although an analytical characterization of the optimal policy under a rank-dependent social welfare is not available even with the knowledge of potential outcome distributions, we show that the average social welfare attained by our estimated policy converges to the maximal attainable welfare at n-1/2 rate uniformly over a large class of data distributions. We also show that this rate is minimax optimal. We provide an application of our method using the data from the National JTPA Study.</p>

时间

2018-03-02(Friday)16:40-18:00

地点

N301, Econ Building

讲座语言

English

主办单位

承办单位

类型

独立讲座

联系人信息

主持人

Qingliang Fan

专题网站

专题

主讲人简介

<div>Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Department of Economics, University College London&nbsp;</div> <p>Research Staff at CeMMAP, Institute for Fiscal Studies</p> <div>Please visit <a href="http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uctptk0/">Prof. Kitagawa's homepage</a> for more information.</div>

期数

主讲人: Toru Kitagawa
主讲人简介:
Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Department of Economics, University College London 

Research Staff at CeMMAP, Institute for Fiscal Studies

Please visit Prof. Kitagawa's homepage for more information.
主持人: Qingliang Fan
简介:
独立讲座
时间: 2018-03-02(Friday)16:40-18:00
地点: N301, Econ Building
类型: 独立讲座