Related papers: Empirical Welfare Analysis with Hedonic Budget Con…
An important goal of empirical demand analysis is choice and welfare prediction on counterfactual budget sets arising from potential policy-interventions. Such predictions are more credible when made without arbitrary…
Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. We develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete…
We develop new robust discrete choice tools to learn about the average willingness to pay for a price subsidy and its effects on demand given exogenous, discrete variation in prices. Our starting point is a nonparametric, nonseparable model…
We propose a nonparametric method for estimating the distribution of consumer welfare from cross-sectional data with no restrictions on individual preferences. First demonstrating that moments of demand identify the curvature of the…
This paper develops and implements a nonparametric test of Random Utility Models. The motivating application is to test the null hypothesis that a sample of cross-sectional demand distributions was generated by a population of rational…
We introduce a novel framework for individual-level welfare analysis. It builds on a parametric model for continuous demand with a quasilinear utility function, allowing for heterogeneous coefficients and unobserved individual-good-level…
Economic theory implies strong limitations on what types of consumption behavior are considered rational. Rationality implies that the Slutsky matrix, which captures the substitution effects of compensated price changes on demand for…
The econometric literature on treatment-effects typically takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities. We show how to incorporate aggregate utility within econometric…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in…
We develop a nonparametric approach to identify and estimate consumer preferences and unobserved heterogeneity under nonlinear price schedules. Leveraging variation across multiple price schedules, we show that both the utility function and…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
Income- and price-elasticity of demand quantify the responsiveness of markets to changes in income, and in prices, respectively. Under the assumptions of utility maximization and preference-independence (additive preferences), mathematical…
We propose a simple and general framework for nonparametric estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects under fairness constraints. Under standard regularity conditions, we show that the resulting estimators possess the double robustness…
We study social welfare in one-sided matching markets where the goal is to efficiently allocate n items to n agents that each have a complete, private preference list and a unit demand over the items. Our focus is on allocation mechanisms…
This paper proposes a framewrok for analyzing how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are unobserved. Rather than focusing solely on average outcomes, the approach uses readily…
Large observational data are increasingly available in disciplines such as health, economic and social sciences, where researchers are interested in causal questions rather than prediction. In this paper, we examine the problem of…
Heterogeneous treatment effects are of major interest in economics. For example, a poverty reduction measure would be best evaluated by its effects on those who would be poor in the absence of the treatment, or by the share among the poor…
Subsidies are commonly used to encourage behaviors that can lead to short- or long-term benefits. Typical examples include subsidized job training programs and provisions of preventive health products, in which both behavioral responses and…
One of the most important empirical findings in microeconometrics is the pervasiveness of heterogeneity in economic behaviour (cf. Heckman 2001). This paper shows that cumulative distribution functions and quantiles of the nonparametric…