Distributional Impact Analysis : Toolkit and Illustrations of Impacts Beyond the Average Treatment Effect
Program evaluations often focus on average treatment effects. However, average treatment effects miss important aspects of policy evaluation, such as the impact on inequality and whether treatment harms some individuals. A growing literature develo...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/292901499351272899/Distributional-impact-analysis-toolkit-and-illustrations-of-impacts-beyond-the-average-treatment-effect http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27642 |
| Summary: | Program evaluations often focus on
average treatment effects. However, average treatment
effects miss important aspects of policy evaluation, such as
the impact on inequality and whether treatment harms some
individuals. A growing literature develops methods to
evaluate such issues by examining the distributional impacts
of programs and policies. This toolkit reviews methods to do
so, focusing on their application to randomized control
trials. The paper emphasizes two strands of the literature:
estimation of impacts on outcome distributions and
estimation of the distribution of treatment impacts. The
article then discusses extensions to conditional treatment
effect heterogeneity, that is, to analyses of how treatment
impacts vary with observed characteristics. The paper offers
advice on inference, testing, and power calculations, which
are important when implementing distributional analyses in
practice. Finally, the paper illustrates select methods
using data from two randomized evaluations. |
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