Collaborative Research: The Econometrics of Reallocations in the Presence of Complementarity and Social Spillovers: Estimands, Identification and Estimation

合作研究：存在互补性和社会溢出效应的重新分配的计量经济学：估计数、识别和估计

• 批准号: 0820361
• 负责人: Bryan Graham
• 金额: $ 21.2万
• 依托单位: National Bureau of Economic Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-08-01 至 2012-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0820361&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Econometrics; Reallocations; Presence

Several controversial social policy debates involve disagreements about the outcome and inequality implications of reallocating individuals across groups. Examples of reallocating policies in public education alone include school busing and desegregation, school vouchers, ability tracking and single-sex schooling. Location-constrained rental vouchers, as provided in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, change the assignment of public housing recipients to neighborhoods. Affirmative action admission rules alter the assignment of students to universities; as the passing of the passing of Proposition 209 in California has dramatically illustrated. Despite the prevalence and controversial nature of reallocating policies, statistical methods for measuring their effects are virtually nonexistent. This project would develop estimands which characterize the average outcome and inequality effects of reallocations as well as corresponding estimation and inference procedures.The potential intellectual merits of the proposed activity include increasing our understanding of how to evaluate reallocating policies empirically. Conventional approaches to program evaluation focus on characterizing the average effect of a policy within an affected population. This information is, at best, only indirectly helpful for predicting the impact of a reallocation. Consider the problem of assigning teachers, of varying quality, to classrooms of students, of varying mean ability. The average effect of a unit change in teacher quality, the traditional evaluation estimand in this context, may be zero, even if the effect of reassigning teachers across classrooms is substantial. The evaluation of reallocations involves a complex interplay between the production technology and the constraints imposed by feasibility. Reallocations are distinct from other policies in that they involve no augmentation, only a redistribution, of resources. This is a feature which helps to explain their often controversial nature.The broader impacts resulting from the proposed activities includes an expansion of the methodological toolkit available to applied researchers interested in the study of reallocating policies, and, more generally, social spillovers or neighborhood/peer effects. STATA and MATLAB software implementing the proposed estimators are developed. The growth in various forms of single-sex public education has been rapid in recent years, and is likely to expand further given recent changes to Title IX regulations. The researchers also apply their techniques to study the effects of the gender composition of a classroom on student achievement and hence contribute to evaluating the case for single-sex schooling.

一些有争议的社会政策辩论涉及对跨群体重新分配个人的结果和不平等影响的分歧。仅在公共教育领域重新分配政策的例子包括校车和废除种族隔离、学券、能力跟踪和单一性别学校教育。美国住房和城市发展部的“转向机会”（MTO）示范中提供的受地点限制的租赁券改变了公共住房接受者对社区的分配。平权行动录取规则改变了学生对大学的分配；加州 209 号提案的通过就戏剧性地说明了这一点。尽管重新分配政策很普遍且存在争议，但衡量其影响的统计方法实际上不存在。该项目将制定描述重新分配的平均结果和不平等效应的估计量以及相应的估计和推理程序。拟议活动的潜在智力价值包括增加我们对如何从经验上评估重新分配政策的理解。项目评估的传统方法侧重于描述政策在受影响人群中的平均效果。这些信息充其量只能间接有助于预测重新分配的影响。考虑将不同质量的教师分配给具有不同平均能力的学生的教室的问题。即使跨班级重新分配教师的影响很大，教师质量的单位变化（这种情况下的传统评估估计值）的平均影响可能为零。重新分配的评估涉及生产技术和可行性约束之间复杂的相互作用。重新分配与其他政策的不同之处在于，它们不涉及资源的增加，而仅涉及资源的重新分配。 这一特征有助于解释其经常引起争议的性质。拟议活动产生的更广泛影响包括扩展对研究重新分配政策感兴趣的应用研究人员可用的方法工具包，以及更普遍的社会溢出效应或邻里/同伴效应。开发了 STATA 和 MATLAB 软件来实现所提出的估计器。近年来，各种形式的单性别公共教育增长迅速，并且鉴于最近第九条法规的变化，可能会进一步扩大。研究人员还运用他们的技术来研究课堂性别构成对学生成绩的影响，从而有助于评估单性别学校教育的案例。