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

一些有争议的社会政策辩论涉及对在群体之间重新分配个人的结果和不平等影响的分歧。仅在公共教育方面，重新分配政策的例子就包括校车接送和废除种族隔离、学券、能力跟踪和单一性别学校。美国住房和城市发展部的“走向机会”（MTO）示范中提供的地点限制租赁券，改变了公共住房接受者对社区的分配。平权行动的录取规则改变了大学对学生的分配;正如加州209号提案的通过所戏剧性地说明的那样。尽管重新分配政策很普遍，而且具有争议性，但衡量其影响的统计方法实际上并不存在。这个项目将开发的estimands的平均结果和不平等的影响，再分配以及相应的估计和推理programmes.The潜在的智力价值的拟议activity包括增加我们的理解，如何评估再分配政策的经验。传统的方案评估方法侧重于描述政策在受影响人口中的平均效果。这些信息充其量只能间接有助于预测重新分配的影响。考虑一下将不同质量的教师分配到不同平均能力的学生的教室的问题。教师质量的一个单位变化的平均影响，在这种情况下，传统的评估估计，可能是零，即使在教室之间重新分配教师的影响是巨大的。重新分配的评估涉及生产技术和可行性所施加的限制之间复杂的相互作用。重新分配与其他政策不同，因为它们不涉及增加资源，而只是重新分配资源。 这一特点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大对研究再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/同行效应。STATA和MATLAB软件实现所提出的估计。近年来，各种形式的单一性别公共教育的增长速度很快，并且由于最近对第九条法规的修改，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组成对学生成绩的影响，从而有助于评估单一性别学校的情况。

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.