Programme Evaluation: Theory and Practice (join a waiting list)

Date:

22/03/2013

Organised by:

PEPA

Presenter:

Charles Manski

Level:

Intermediate (some prior knowledge)

Contact:

Kylie Groves, enquiries@pepa.ac.uk

Map:

View in Google Maps  (WC1E 7AE)

Venue:

IFS, 7 Ridgmount Street, London.

Description:

This 1 day PEPA workshop.

Programme

10:00 - 10:30 Registration and coffee

10:30 - 11:30 Charles Manski
11:30 - 12:30 Aleksey Tetenov

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch

13:30 - 14:30 Toru Kitagawa

14:30 - 15:00 Break

15:00 - 16:00 Zahra Siddique
16:00 - 17:00 Debopam Bhattacharya

 

Confirmed Speakers:

Charles Manski, Northwestern

Diagnostic Testing and Treatment Under Ambiguity: Using Decision Analysis to Inform Clinical Practice.

Partial knowledge of patient health status and treatment response is a pervasive concern in medical decision making.  Clinical practice guidelines make recommendations intended to optimize patient care, but optimization typically is infeasible with partial knowledge.    To demonstrate, this paper studies a common scenario regarding diagnostic testing and treatment.  A patient presents to a clinician, who obtains initial evidence on health status.  The clinician can prescribe a treatment immediately or he can order a test yielding further evidence that may be useful in predicting treatment response.  In the latter case, he prescribes a treatment after observation of the test result.

Debopam Bhattacharya, Oxford

Testing Academic Fairness of University Admissions under Selection on Unobservables

We develope an empirical method of testing whether a university admits applicants with the highest academic potential and identifying the extent of "admission-bias" when it doesn't. We assume that applicants who are better-qualified along every observable academic performance-indicator are stochastically better in characteristics unobservable to us but weighed positively by admission-tutors. This assumption yields informative bounds on differences in admission-thresholds faced by different demographic groups. Applying our methods to admissions-data at Oxford and using blindly-marked exam-performance as outcome, we find admission-thresholds are significantly higher for males and slightly so for private-school applicants. In contrast, average admission-rates are equal across gender and school-type.
 

Toru Kitagawa, UCL and CeMMAP

Covariate Selection and Model Averaging for Semiparametric Estimation of Treatment Effects (with Chris Muris)

  

  This paper develops a data-driven way of selecting a propensity score specification, when one is interested in estimating the average treatment effects for treated (ATT) using a propensity score weighting method.  Building on the idea of focussed information criterion (FIC), our approach aims to select the optimal specification of the propensity score, which minimizes the asymptotic mean squared error of the ATT estimator obtained via the local asymptotic approximation.  As a smoothed version of the FIC-based model selection, this paper also considers an optimal way of averaging the ATT estimators over the candidate specifications.  This model averaging problem is formulated as a statistical decision problem in a limit normal experiment, and the Bayes decision corresponding to the improper flat prior for the localisation parameters is proposed as an optimal averaging scheme.

 

Zahra Siddique, Reading

Partially Identified Treatment Effects Under Imperfect Compliance: The Case of Domestic Violence

The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (MDVE) is a randomized social experiment with imperfect compliance which has been extremely influential in how police officers respond to misdemeanor domestic violence. This paper re-examines data from the MDVE, using recent literature on partial identification to find recidivism associated with a policy that arrests misdemeanor domestic violence suspects rather than not arresting them. Using partially identified bounds on the average treatment effect I find that arresting rather than not arresting suspects can potentially reduce recidivism by more than two-and-a-half times the corresponding intent-to-treat estimate and more than two times the corresponding local average treatment effect, even when making minimal assumptions on counterfactuals.

Aleksey Tetenov, Collegio Carlo Alberto

Statistical Hypothesis Testing and Private Information

Null hypothesis testing is a conventional practice in policy evaluation, but it was not well supported by economic reasoning. I show how the hypothesis testing criterion could be rationally motivated as a screening device in settings where public policies are proposed by self-interested parties and how the test level should be set depending on the payoffs of policy proponents.

 

Please note that further speakers may be confirmed at a later date.

Prior Knowledge:  It is expected that the audience will have working knowledge of economics in general, and programme evaluation in particular

 

Cost:

Free

Website and registration:

Region:

Greater London

Keywords:

Frameworks for Research and Research Designs, Evaluation Research, Case Study, Programme Evaluation, University admissions, academic fairness, economic efficiency, marginal admit, unobserved heterogeneity, median dominance, partial identification, bounds.

Related publications and presentations:

Frameworks for Research and Research Designs
Evaluation Research
Case Study

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