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Abstract We estimate the impact of piped water and sewers on property values in late 19th century Chicago. The cost of sewer construction depends sensitively on imperceptible variation in elevation, and such variation delays water and sewer service to part of the city. This delay provides quasirandom variation for causal estimates. We extrapolate ate estimates from our natural experiment to the area treated with water and sewer service during 1874–1880 using a new estimator.…

非线性遗憾下的处理选择AI 解读

Summary Following Savage (1951)and Manski (2004), the literature on statistical treatment choice focuses on the mean of welfare regret. Ignoring other features of the regret distribution, however, can lead to a rule that is sensitive to sampling uncertainty. We propose to minimize the mean of a nonlinear transformation of regret and show that singleton rules are not essentially complete for nonlinear regret. Focusing on mean-square regret, we derive closed-form fractions for…

选择由谁选择：能源返利项目中的自选择定向政策AI 解读

We develop an optimal policy assignment rule that integrates two distinctive approaches commonly used in economics—targeting by observables and targeting through self‐selection . Our method can be used with experimental or quasi‐experimental data to identify who should be treated, be untreated, and self‐select to achieve a policymaker's objective. Applying this method to a randomized controlled trial on a residential energy rebate program, we find that targeting that…

动态因果效应中的非线性：能否改善不佳情形并强化良好情形？AI 解读

This article was prepared as a comment on “Dynamic Causal Effects in a Nonlinear World: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” by Michal Kolesár and Mikkel Plagborg-Møller. We make three comments, including a novel contribution to the literature, showing how a reasonable economic interpretation can potentially be restored for average-effect estimators with negative weights.

谁应接种疫苗？SIR 网络上的个性化疫苗分配AI 解读

How to allocate vaccines over heterogeneous individuals is one of the important policy decisions in pandemic times. This paper develops a procedure to estimate an individualized vaccine allocation policy under limited supply, exploiting social network data containing individual demographic characteristics and health status. We model the spillover effects of vaccination based on a Heterogeneous-Interacted-SIR network model and estimate an individualized vaccine allocation…

叙事限制与代理变量AI 解读

We compare two approaches to using information about the signs of structural shocks at specific dates within a structural vector autoregression (SVAR): imposing "narrative restrictions" (NR) on the shock signs in an otherwise set-identified SVAR; and casting the information about the shock signs as a discrete-valued "narrative proxy" (NP) to point-identify the impulse responses. The NP is likely to be "weak" given that the sign of the shock is typically known in a small…

代理 SVAR 的稳健贝叶斯推断AI 解读

We develop methods for robust Bayesian inference in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) where the parameters of interest are set-identified using external instruments, or ‘proxy SVARs’. Set-identification in these models typically occurs when there are multiple instruments for multiple structural shocks. Existing Bayesian approaches to inference in proxy SVARs require researchers to specify a single prior over the model’s parameters, but, under set-identification, a…

识别假设的不确定性AI 解读

Uncertainty about the choice of identifying assumptions is common in causal studies, but is often ignored in empirical practice. This paper considers uncertainty over models that impose different identifying assumptions, which can lead to a mix of point‐ and set‐identified models. We propose performing inference in the presence of such uncertainty by generalizing Bayesian model averaging. The method considers multiple posteriors for the set‐identified models and combines…

模糊断点回归识别假设的检验AI 解读

We propose a new specification test for assessing the validity of fuzzy regression discontinuity designs (FRD‐validity). We derive a new set of testable implications, characterized by a set of inequality restrictions on the joint distribution of observed outcomes and treatment status at the cut‐off. We show that this new characterization exploits all of the information in the data that is useful for detecting violations of FRD‐validity. Our approach differs from and…

工具变量独立性下潜在结果分布的识别区域AI 解读

This paper examines the identifying power of instrument exogeneity in the treatment effect model. We derive the identification region of the potential outcome distributions, which are the collection of distributions that are compatible with data and with the restrictions of the model. We consider identification when (i) the instrument is independent of each of the potential outcomes (marginal independence), (ii) the instrument is independent of the potential outcomes and…

估计断点之后的推断AI 解读

In an important class of econometric problems, researchers select a target parameter by maximizing the Euclidean norm of a data-dependent vector. Examples that can be cast into this frame include threshold regression models with estimated thresholds and structural break models with estimated break dates. Estimation and inference procedures that ignore the randomness of the target parameter can be severely biased and misleading when this randomness is non-negligible. This…

兼顾平等的处理分配决策AI 解读

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 article develops a method to estimate the optimal treatment assignment policy based on observable individual covariates when the policy…

集合识别模型的稳健贝叶斯推断AI 解读

This paper reconciles the asymptotic disagreement between Bayesian and frequentist inference in set‐identified models by adopting a multiple‐prior (robust) Bayesian approach. We propose new tools for Bayesian inference in set‐identified models and show that they have a well‐defined posterior interpretation in finite samples and are asymptotically valid from the frequentist perspective. The main idea is to construct a prior class that removes the source of the disagreement:…

不可微函数的后验分布AI 解读

This paper examines the asymptotic behavior of the posterior distribution of a possibly nondifferentiable function g(θ), where θ is a finite-dimensional parameter of either a parametric or semiparametric model. The main assumption is that the distribution of a suitable estimator θ̂n, its bootstrap approximation, and the Bayesian posterior for θ all agree asymptotically.

大多无害的模拟？用蒙特卡洛研究选择估计量AI 解读

Summary We consider two recent suggestions for how to perform an empirically motivated Monte Carlo study to help select a treatment effect estimator under unconfoundedness. We show theoretically that neither is likely to be informative except under restrictive conditions that are unlikely to be satisfied in many contexts. To test empirical relevance, we also apply the approaches to a real‐world setting where estimator performance is known. Both approaches are worse than…

谁应接受处理？处理选择的经验福利最大化方法AI 解读

One of the main objectives of empirical analysis of experiments and quasi‐experiments is to inform policy decisions that determine the allocation of treatments to individuals with different observable covariates. We study the properties and implementation of the Empirical Welfare Maximization (EWM) method, which estimates a treatment assignment policy by maximizing the sample analog of average social welfare over a class of candidate treatment policies. The EWM approach is…

处理效应半参数估计中的模型平均AI 解读

Choosing the covariates and functional form of the propensity score is an important choice for estimating treatment effects. This paper proposes a data-driven way of averaging the estimators over candidate specifications to resolve the specification uncertainty in the propensity score weighting estimation of the ATT. The proposed procedures minimize the estimated MSE of the ATT estimator in a local asymptotic framework. We formulate model averaging as a statistical decision…

工具变量有效性检验AI 解读

This paper develops a specification test for instrument validity in the heterogeneous treatment effect model with a binary treatment and a discrete instrument. The strongest testable implication for instrument validity is given by the condition for nonnegativity of point‐identifiable compliers' outcome densities. Our specification test infers this testable implication using a variance‐weighted Kolmogorov–Smirnov test statistic. The test can be applied to both discrete and…