Econometric Demand and Welfare Analysis

计量需求与福利分析

• 批准号: ES/W010461/1
• 负责人: Debopam Bhattacharya
• 金额: $ 69.75万
• 依托单位: University of Cambridge
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FW010461%2F1
• 关键词: Econometric; Demand; Welfare; Analysis

Market-interventions by the government are ubiquitous in real life and include taxes and subsidies on products and services, regulation of industries and moderation of market-power, expansion of catchment areas for school-choice, behavioral nudges and subsidies to steer under-informed decision-makers towards their optimal choice of insurance products, and so forth. The proposed project aims to develop novel econometric tools for practical cost-benefit analysis of such interventions using micro-level data. The key challenge of such calculations is the measurement of the benefits via consumer welfare, which equals the monetary value to the consumer of the change resulting from the policy intervention, that is typically unobserved by a researcher. Further, when consumers differ in preferences, the benefits and costs are heterogeneous, hence statistical analysis is required to characterize the distribution of welfare across the population. The proposed project aims to develop econometric tools to enable such analysis. These tools will be useful for (1) understanding the nature of consumer preferences from observed choice behavior, and (2) for applying that knowledge to evaluate existing and potential public policies in terms of their impact on social welfare in a variety of important real-life contexts such as education, housing, healthcare, commuter travel and holiday accommodation. The proposal consists of four parts addressing the following specific questions:(A) How to incorporate aggregate social welfare in econometric program evaluation and the optimal targeting of policies; the existing literature typically foucuses on an individual outcome as its object of study, as opposed to how much that particular outcome is worth to the individual herself.(B) how to measure consumer welfare in hedonic settings where there are many possible alternatives, each characterized by a few features that individuals have preference over, such as local amenities and crime in housing choice and student-teacher ratio and academic outcomes in school-choice.(C) how to test optimality of individuals' choice of insurance-plans and the welfare potential of nudges in insurance markets, using micro-data on choice of cover and subsequent claims.(D) how to use `big data' collected from online listings to analyze demand patterns and consumer welfare in markets with both traditional and online providers, with an application to calculating the welfare impact of the shared accommodation service Airbnb. The common theme of these sub-projects is the development of novel econometric methods for analyzing cross-sectional data for practical welfare calculations that are founded on rigorous economic theory. The ultimate goal is to obtain credible empirical results by imposing minimal or no assumptions on heterogeneity in individual preferences unobserved by researchers. This is in contrast to available empirical tools for welfare analysis in the existing econometric literature which rely on analytically convenient but economically unsubstantiated ad-hoc assumptions on consumer preferences and their heterogeneity. As such, the proposed project will build on the research programme started by the PI that was funded by a 5-year Consolidator grant by the European Research Council between 2016-21, and expand its boundaries both substantively to previously unexplored contexts and technically to analyzing new types of data in order to provide credible answers to fundamental policy questions relevant to these contexts.

政府的市场干预在现实生活中无处不在，包括对产品和服务的税收和补贴、对行业的监管和市场力量的适度、扩大择校的范围、引导信息不足的决策者选择最优保险产品的行为督促和补贴等等。拟议的项目旨在开发新的计量经济学工具，利用微观数据对这类干预措施进行实际成本效益分析。这种计算的关键挑战是通过消费者福利来衡量利益，消费者福利等于政策干预导致的变化对消费者的货币价值，而研究人员通常没有观察到这一点。此外，当消费者的偏好不同时，收益和成本是不同的，因此需要统计分析来表征福利在整个人口中的分配。拟议的项目旨在开发能够进行这种分析的计量经济学工具。这些工具将有助于(1)从观察到的选择行为中了解消费者偏好的性质，以及(2)应用这些知识来评估现有和潜在的公共政策在各种重要的现实生活背景下对社会福利的影响，如教育、住房、医疗保健、通勤旅行和度假住宿。该提案由四个部分组成，涉及以下具体问题：(A)如何将社会福利总额纳入计量经济学方案评估和政策的最佳目标；现有文献通常侧重于个人结果作为其研究对象，而不是该特定结果对个人本身的价值。(B)如何在有许多可能的替代方案的享乐环境中衡量消费者福利，每个替代方案的特征都是个人更喜欢的几个特征，例如在住房选择中的当地便利设施和犯罪，以及在选择学校时的学生与教师比例和学业成绩。(C)如何测试个人选择保险计划的最优程度，以及保险市场上小推的福利潜力，使用关于保险选择和后续索赔的微观数据。(D)如何使用从在线清单收集的“大数据”来分析传统和在线供应商市场的需求模式和消费者福利，并应用于计算共享住宿服务Airbnb的福利影响。这些子项目的共同主题是开发新的计量经济学方法，用于分析横截面数据，用于实际的福利计算，这些计算建立在严格的经济理论基础上。最终目标是通过对研究人员没有观察到的个体偏好的异质性施加最少的假设或不施加任何假设来获得可信的经验结果。这与现有计量经济学文献中用于福利分析的现有经验工具形成对比，这些工具依赖于分析上方便但在经济上没有确凿证据的关于消费者偏好及其异质性的特别假设。因此，拟议的项目将以欧洲研究理事会2016-21年间由欧洲研究理事会提供的为期5年的综合赠款资助的PI启动的研究方案为基础，并将其范围从实质性扩展到以前未探索的背景和从技术上分析新类型的数据，以便为与这些背景相关的基本政策问题提供可信的答案。