Welfare Analysis via Marginal Treatment Effects

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 Moffit...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2020-12
Main Authors: Sasaki, Yuya, Ura, Takuya
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Decision theory
Empirical analysis
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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).
ISSN:2331-8422