The Econometrics of Evaluating Social Programs

假设一个政府正在考虑实施一项培训计划。实施该计划的决定取决于对其可能有效性的评估。政策制定者通常有以前实施同一项目的可用数据来为这一决策提供信息。利用以前培训项目的数据来预测新项目的有效性需要两个步骤。首先是使用前一个项目的数据来评估特定项目的有效性的问题。第二步是将旧程序得到的结果推广到新程序。目前的建议侧重于第二步。研究者讨论了这个问题是如何与标准评估问题相关的，以及倾向评分方法是如何有用的。他建议发展这些方法的扩展，这些方法是为二元治疗情况而开发的，以允许多值和连续治疗。他还打算将这些方法应用于两个不同的数据集。在这两种情况下都使用了随机分配，因此根据所提出的方法，可以获得真实平均效应的无偏估计来判断估计器的性能。

Consider a government contemplating the implementation of a training program. The decision to implement the program depends on the assessment of its likely effectiveness. Often the policy maker has available data from a previous implementation of the same program to inform this decision. There are two steps involved in exploiting data from previous training programs in predicting the effectiveness of the new program. First is the problem of using the data from the previous program to evaluate the effectiveness of that specific program. The second step is to generalize the results obtained for the old program to the new program. The current proposal focusses on the second step.The investigator discusses how this problem is related to the standard evaluation problem, and how propensity score methods can be useful. He proposes developing extensions of these methods that were developed for the binary treatment case to allow for multivalued and continuous treatments. He also intends to apply these methods to two different data sets. In both cases randomized assignment was used so unbiased estimates of the true average effect are available to judge the performance of estimators based on the proposed methodology.