Social Interactions and the Optimal Design of Welfare Systems

社会互动与福利制度优化设计

• 批准号: ES/T00178X/1
• 负责人: Aureo De Paula
• 金额: $ 64.41万
• 依托单位: Institute for Fiscal Studies
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FT00178X%2F1
• 关键词: Social; Interactions; Optimal; Design; Welfare

Regarding the provision of public services, whether in education, health, poverty alleviation, or others, quality of service is as important as quantity in both developed and developing nations. Those services are provided by teachers, doctors, nurses, or social workers (for example), and discussing quality of services means discussing their recruitment and performance.Our project studies this within the welfare system. We focus on the importance of social worker (SW) quality for the families they serve, and on how to redesign the allocation of SWs to families to improve the overall effectiveness of the system.We examine a social programme, Chile Solidario (CS), targeting the poorest 2.5% Chileans, and generalise the lessons learned to other contexts. We also provide new statistical and economic tools to address important and challenging issues in our analysis: how to measure SW quality, how to account for social interactions in the choices and behaviours of poor families, how to optimally allocate SWs to families with or without the presence of social interactions across families.1. What difference do SWs make to the outcomes of the families they serve? What determines their effectiveness? How important is the selection of SWs for each family?Most studies evaluating welfare services ignore the provision quality, mainly because quality is difficult to measure. Yet, quality differences between providers may drive large differences in their impact. Because of the difficulty in collecting relevant, observable input-based quality measures, researchers have turned to performance-based measures. The most glaring example is education, where teacher value added (VA) estimates have gained traction as a measure of teacher quality. Teacher VA measures the average learning of children taught by a particular teacher. In this project we will produce the first estimates of SW VA for a Chilean welfare program targeting the poorest members of society (bottom 2.5% of the income distribution). We recognise that SWs operate on several dimensions of families' lives. Therefore, we will compute VA in terms of different outcomes and will assess the extent to which SWs specialise across outcomes.2. How large are spillovers in social program participation? Through which mechanisms do they operate? How do spillovers affect the design and targeting of social programs?Typical social programme evaluations focus on individual impacts. There is however increasing concern that social programs have impacts well beyond the individual. Possible spillovers from treated individuals to other members of the community have been increasingly added into program evaluations, and even influenced their designs. It is particularly fitting to examine spillovers in the context of anti-poverty programs. Social interactions may influence both the take up of such programs (say, through the potential of stigma, or through the sharing of information), and their impacts on the lives of the poor. The empirical models studying such spillovers are relatively limited though, so far ignoring feedback effects generated by interactions between members of the same group. Feedback effects are interesting because they can amplify or dampen programme impacts, possibly leading to participation and non-participation traps. We build on recent econometric work on these topics to identify and estimate models with social interactions.3. How do we quantify SW VA in the presence of social interactions? How do interactions change the optimal allocation of SWs to families? It is natural to put these questions together and re-examine the calculation of SW VA in the presence of spillovers. In this context, the impact of a SW can go well beyond its impact on the outcomes of the targeted family. Social interactions of this type can affect the optimal match of families and SW. What matters is not only this match, but also the way it spreads through the network.

在提供公共服务方面，无论是在教育、卫生、扶贫还是其他方面，服务的质量与数量一样重要，这在发达国家和发展中国家都是如此。这些服务是由教师、医生、护士或社会工作者（例如）提供的，讨论服务质量意味着讨论他们的招聘和表现。我们的项目在福利制度中研究这一点。我们关注社工素质对他们所服务的家庭的重要性，以及如何重新设计社工分配给家庭，以提高系统的整体效率。我们研究了一项社会计划，智利团结（CS），目标是最贫穷的2.5%的智利人，并将经验教训推广到其他情况。我们还提供了新的统计和经济工具来解决我们分析中的重要和具有挑战性的问题：如何衡量社会福利质量，如何解释贫困家庭选择和行为中的社会互动，如何将社会福利最优地分配给有或没有家庭间社会互动的家庭。社会福利工作者对他们所服务的家庭的结果有什么影响？是什么决定了它们的有效性？对每个家庭来说，选择sw有多重要？大多数评估福利服务的研究都忽略了提供服务的质量，主要是因为质量难以衡量。然而，供应商之间的质量差异可能会导致其影响的巨大差异。由于难以收集相关的、可观察的、基于投入的质量度量，研究人员转向了基于绩效的度量。最明显的例子是教育，教师附加值（VA）的估算已经成为衡量教师质量的标准。教师VA衡量的是某一特定教师所教儿童的平均学习水平。在这个项目中，我们将为智利一项针对社会最贫困成员（收入分配中最低的2.5%）的福利计划首次估算SW VA。我们认识到社会福利在家庭生活的几个方面起作用。因此，我们将根据不同的结果计算VA，并将评估SWs在不同结果方面的专业程度。参与社会项目的溢出效应有多大？它们通过哪些机制运作？溢出效应如何影响社会项目的设计和目标？典型的社会方案评价侧重于个人影响。然而，越来越多的人担心，社会项目的影响远远超出了个人。治疗个体对社区其他成员可能产生的溢出效应已经越来越多地加入到项目评估中，甚至影响了项目的设计。在反贫困项目的背景下考察溢出效应尤为合适。社会互动可能会影响这类项目的实施（例如，通过潜在的污名化，或通过信息共享），以及它们对穷人生活的影响。然而，研究这种溢出效应的实证模型相对有限，迄今为止忽略了同一群体成员之间相互作用产生的反馈效应。反馈效应很有趣，因为它们可以放大或减弱方案的影响，可能导致参与和不参与的陷阱。我们在这些主题上建立了最近的计量经济学工作，以识别和估计具有社会相互作用的模型。我们如何在社会互动中量化SW VA ？相互作用如何改变社会福利对家庭的最佳分配？把这些问题放在一起，并在存在溢出效应的情况下重新审视SW VA的计算，是很自然的。在这种情况下，SW的影响可能远远超出其对目标家庭结果的影响。这种类型的社会互动可以影响家庭与SW的最佳匹配。重要的不仅是这场比赛，还有它在网络上传播的方式。