Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/211091 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Series/Report no.: 
cemmap working paper No. CWP71/18
Publisher: 
Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (cemmap), London
Abstract: 
The goal of many randomized experiments and quasi-experimental studies in economics is to inform policies that aim to raise incomes and reduce economic inequality. A policy maximizing the sum of individual incomes may not be desirable if it magni fies economic inequality and post-treatment redistribution of income is infeasible. This paper develops a method to estimate the optimal treatment assignment policy based on observable individual covariates when the policy objective is to maximize an equality-minded rank-dependent social welfare function, which puts higher weight on individuals with lower-ranked outcomes. We estimate the optimal policy by maximizing a sample analog of the rank-dependent welfare over a properly constrained set of policies. We show that the average social welfare attained by our estimated policy converges to the maximal attainable welfare at n-1/2 rate uniformly over a large class of data distributions when the propensity score is known. We also show that this rate is minimax optimal. We provide an application of our method using the data from the National JTPA Study.
Subjects: 
Program evaluation
Treatment choice
Social welfare
Inequality index
Gini coeffcient
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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