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Welfare Analysis via Marginal Treatment Effects

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  • Yuya Sasaki
  • Takuya Ura

Abstract

Consider a causal structure with endogeneity (i.e., unobserved confoundedness) in empirical data, where an instrumental variable is available. In this setting, we show that the mean social welfare function can be identified and represented via the marginal treatment effect (MTE, Bjorklund and Moffitt, 1987) as the operator kernel. This representation result can be applied to a variety of statistical decision rules for treatment choice, including plug-in rules, Bayes rules, and empirical welfare maximization (EWM) rules as in Hirano and Porter (2020, Section 2.3). Focusing on the application to the EWM framework of Kitagawa and Tetenov (2018), we provide convergence rates of the worst case average welfare loss (regret) in the spirit of Manski (2004).

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  • Yuya Sasaki & Takuya Ura, 2020. "Welfare Analysis via Marginal Treatment Effects," Papers 2012.07624, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2012.07624
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Timothy B. Armstrong & Shu Shen, 2013. "Inference on Optimal Treatment Assignments," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1927RR, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, revised Apr 2015.
    2. James J. Heckman & Vytlacil, Edward J., 2007. "Econometric Evaluation of Social Programs, Part II: Using the Marginal Treatment Effect to Organize Alternative Econometric Estimators to Evaluate Social Programs, and to Forecast their Effects in New," Handbook of Econometrics, in: J.J. Heckman & E.E. Leamer (ed.), Handbook of Econometrics, edition 1, volume 6, chapter 71, Elsevier.
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    6. Toru Kitagawa & Aleksey Tetenov, 2018. "Who Should Be Treated? Empirical Welfare Maximization Methods for Treatment Choice," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 86(2), pages 591-616, March.
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    9. Eric Mbakop & Max Tabord‐Meehan, 2021. "Model Selection for Treatment Choice: Penalized Welfare Maximization," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 89(2), pages 825-848, March.
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    Cited by:

    1. Toru Kitagawa & Hugo Lopez & Jeff Rowley, 2022. "Stochastic Treatment Choice with Empirical Welfare Updating," Papers 2211.01537, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2023.
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    3. Yan Liu, 2022. "Policy Learning under Endogeneity Using Instrumental Variables," Papers 2206.09883, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2024.

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