Related papers: Welfare at Risk: Distributional impact of policy i…
This paper studies the problem of optimally allocating treatments in the presence of spillover effects, using information from a (quasi-)experiment. I introduce a method that maximizes the sample analog of average social welfare when…
In this paper, we explore optimal treatment allocation policies that target distributional welfare. Most literature on treatment choice has considered utilitarian welfare based on the conditional average treatment effect (ATE). While…
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…
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…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
This paper studies identification and inference of the welfare gain that results from switching from one policy (such as the status quo policy) to another policy. The welfare gain is not point identified in general when data are obtained…
We study the optimal joint intervention of a planner who can influence both the standalone marginal utilities of agents in a network and the weights of the links connecting them. The welfare-maximizing intervention displays two key…
Current methodologies in machine learning analyze the effects of various statistical parity notions of fairness primarily in light of their impacts on predictive accuracy and vendor utility loss. In this paper, we propose a new framework…
Quantifying the impact of regulatory policies on social welfare generally requires the identification of counterfactual distributions. Many of these policies (e.g. minimum wages or minimum working time) generate mass points and/or…
This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering 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…
This paper develops a framework for identifying treatment effects when a policy simultaneously alters both the incentive to participate and the outcome of interest -- such as hiring decisions and wages in response to employment subsidies;…
Improving social welfare is a complex challenge requiring policymakers to optimize objectives across multiple time horizons. Evaluating the impact of such policies presents a fundamental challenge, as those that appear suboptimal in the…
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…
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…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
We formulate a flexible micro-to-macro kinetic model which is able to explain the emergence of income profiles out of a whole of individual economic interactions. The model is expressed by a system of several nonlinear differential…
This paper studies experimental designs for estimation and inference on policies with spillover effects. Units are organized into a finite number of large clusters and interact in unknown ways within each cluster. First, we introduce a…
We develop an axiomatic framework to evaluate income distributions from the perspective of an opportunity-egalitarian social planner. Building on a formal link with the literature on decision theory under ambiguity, we characterize a class…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…