Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation

2009/03/01 by Guido W. Imbens, Guido W Imbens, Jeffrey M Wooldridge +1 · 86 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Mathematics · Social Sciences · #Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth #Advanced Causal Inference Techniques #School Choice and Performance

paper · pdf · doi:10.1257/jel.47.1.5

Abstract

Many empirical questions in economics and other social sciences depend on causal effects of programs or policies. In the last two decades, much research has been done on the econometric and statistical analysis of such causal effects. This recent theoretical literature has built on, and combined features of, earlier work in both the statistics and econometrics literatures. It has by now reached a level of maturity that makes it an important tool in many areas of empirical research in economics, including labor economics, public finance, development economics, industrial organization, and other areas of empirical microeconomics. In this review, we discuss some of the recent developments. We focus primarily on practical issues for empirical researchers, as well as provide a historical overview of the area and give references to more technical research.

Citations

• Inference and missing data
• Identification and Estimation of Local Average Treatment Effects
• Invited Commentary: Propensity Scores
• Dealing with limited overlap in estimation of average treatment effects
• Statistical Treatment Rules for Heterogeneous Populations
• Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence
• The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects
• Confidence Intervals for Partially Identified Parameters
• Efficient Estimation of Average Treatment Effects Using the Estimated Propensity Score
• Matching Using Estimated Propensity Scores: Relating Theory to Practice
• Constructing a Control Group Using Multivariate Matched Sampling Methods That Incorporate the Propensity Score

Cited by

• The New Economics of Equilibrium Sorting and Policy Evaluation Using Housing Markets
• DO “CAPITALIZATION EFFECTS” FOR PUBLIC GOODS REVEAL THE PUBLIC'S WILLINGNESS TO PAY?
• Heterogeneous effects of fiscal rules: The Maastricht fiscal criterion and the counterfactual distribution of government deficits✰
• The Asymmetric Effect of Credit Supply on Firm‐Level Productivity Growth
• Caution: Do Not Cross! Distance to Regulatory Capital Buffers and Corporate Lending in a Downturn
• Control Function Methods in Applied Econometrics
• Democracy Does Cause Growth
• Do municipal unions improve cost efficiency for the social function? A quasi‐experimental endogenous stochastic frontier approach
• The role of conferences on the pathway to academic impact: Evidence from a natural experiment
• Climate change-related regulatory risks and bank lending
• Potential Outcome and Directed Acyclic Graph Approaches to Causality: Relevance for Empirical Practice in Economics
• Financial Inclusion, Shocks, and Poverty
• How Does Monetary Policy Pass‐Through Affect Mortgage Default? Evidence from the Irish Mortgage Market
• Returns to Scale in Property Assessment: Evidence from New York State’s Small Localities Coordination Program
• Paying for Digital Information: Assessing Farmers’ Willingness to Pay for a Digital Agriculture and Nutrition Service in Ghana
• Justification of violence, ideological preferences, and exposure to protests: causal evidence from the 2019 Chilean social unrest
• Contamination Bias in Linear Regressions
• Channeling Fisher: Randomization Tests and the Statistical Insignificance of Seemingly Significant Experimental Results*
• Cannabis use, attitudes, and legal status in the U.S.: A review
• Start-up subsidies for the unemployed: Long-term evidence and effect heterogeneity
• Penalized spline estimation in the partially linear model
• Social norms and energy conservation
• Direct and spillover effects of a social information campaign on residential water-savings
• Mandated Sick Pay: Coverage, Utilization, and Crowding-in
• An introduction to causal discovery
• Estimation Methods for Cluster Randomized Trials with Noncompliance: A Study of A Biometric Smartcard Payment System in India
• Evaluating Ex Ante Counterfactual Predictions Using Ex Post Causal Inference
• Collaborative management partnerships strongly decreased deforestation in the most at-risk protected areas in Africa since 2000
• Estimating Causal Effects With Observational Data: Guidelines for Agricultural and Applied Economists
• Does cyberbullying impact youth suicidal behaviors?
• Biased-sample empirical likelihood weighting: an alternative to inverse probability weighting
• Machine Learning Methods Economists Should Know About
• Doubly robust difference-in-differences estimators
• Estimation of Conditional Average Treatment Effects with High-Dimensional Data
• Causal Inference in Sociological Research
• Causal Inference About the Effects of Interventions From Observational Studies in Medical Journals
• The Impact of Response Measures on COVID-19-Related Hospitalization and\n Death Rates in Germany and Switzerland
• Does Financial Education Impact Financial Literacy and Financial Behavior, and If So, When?
• Cattle ranchers and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: Production, location, and policies
• Bullying, cyberbullying, and youth health behaviors
• Regret Minimization for Causal Inference on Large Treatment Space
• Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials
• Assessing the Impact of China's Broadband Village Pilot Project on the Consumption Patterns of Rural Households
• Revisiting regression adjustment in experiments with heterogeneous treatment effects
• Chain Restaurant Calorie Posting Laws, Obesity, and Consumer Welfare
• A Double Machine Learning Approach to Estimate the Effects of Musical Practice on Student's Skills
• An approach for assessing whether agricultural projects help smallholders transition to better livelihood strategies: A malawian case study
• Impacts of extension access and cooperative membership on technology adoption and household welfare
• Financial System Integration of Microstates: The Case of San Marino and the EU Association Agreement
• Statistical matching for conservation science
• Patent pledgeability, trade secrecy, and corporate patenting
• The impact of issuer-pay on corporate bond rating properties: Evidence from Moody׳s and S&P׳s initial adoptions
• Spillover Effects in Cluster Randomized Trials with Noncompliance
• Crisis leadership: A review and future research agenda
• Natural experiments in leadership research: An introduction, review, and guidelines
• Common methodological mistakes
• The Oaxaca–Blinder Unexplained Component as a Treatment Effects Estimator
• Unlocking Agricultural Productivity: The Role of Land Rental Markets in Reducing Resource Misallocation
• The Effects of Managerial Turnover
• Impact of Sugarcane Production Participation on Household Food Security in Uganda
• Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Supporting farmers dealing with climate change: The impact of Participatory Integrated Climate Services for Agriculture (<scp>PICSA</scp>) on smallholder lead farmers in Malawi
• The business case for demographic diversity in strategic leadership teams: A systematic and critical review of the causal evidence
• New casinos and local labor markets: Evidence from Canada
• Average Gaps and Oaxaca–Blinder Decompositions: A Cautionary Tale about Regression Estimates of Racial Differences in Labor Market Outcomes
• Efficient Difference-in-Differences Estimation with High-Dimensional\n Common Trend Confounding
• Blockchain-Enabled Water Management and Crop Optimization in Arid Regions: A Sustainable Path to Food and Energy Security – The Australian Case
• Can Collective Action Institutions Outperform the State?
• When Broadband Comes to Banks: Credit Supply, Market Structure, and Information Acquisition
• Don’t Shoot the Pianist: Creative Firms, Workers, and Neighborhood Gentrification
• Solar‐powered cold‐storage and agrifood market modernization in Nigeria
• The effect of past successes on the probability of a current success: evidence from a natural experiment
• Lights On: How Transparency Increases Compliance in Cambodian Global Value Chains
• Nonparametric bootstrap for propensity score matching estimators
• Revisiting the impact of decoupled subsidies on farm performance: a counterfactual analysis using microdata
• COVID-19 emergency cash transfer and pregnancy in Brazil
• Do managerial incentives facilitate anti-competitive behavior? Evidence from collusion
• Hölder Bounds for Sensitivity Analysis in Causal Reasoning
• The health and welfare effects of environmental governance: Evidence from China
• Affordable Uplift: Supervised Randomization in Controlled Experiments
• OLS and 2SLS in Randomized and Conditionally Randomized Experiments
• Using Multiple Pre-treatment Periods to Improve Difference-in-Differences and Staggered Adoption Design
• Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Population Mobility under Mild\n Policies: Causal Evidence from Sweden
• The impacts of widespread agricultural interventions on yields and food security in Ethiopia☆
• Employment Protection Laws and Privatization
• Does eco-certification stem tropical deforestation? Forest Stewardship Council certification in Mexico

Related

• Econometrics for Evaluations: An Introduction to Recent Developments
• The State of Applied Econometrics - Causality and Policy Evaluation
• Alternative Approaches to Evaluation in Empirical Microeconomics
• Evaluating Program Sequences with Double Machine Learning: An Application to Labor Market Policies
• Designing Studies to Detect Impacts on Earnings