Estimating the Effect of Treatments Allocated by Randomized Waiting Lists. / Clément de Chaisemartin, Luc Behaghel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

de Chaisemartin, Clément.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Behaghel, Luc.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26282.

NBER working paper series no. w26282

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2019.

Summary:

Oversubscribed treatments are often allocated using randomized waiting lists. Applicants are ranked randomly, and treatment offers are made following that ranking until all seats are filled. To estimate causal effects, researchers often compare applicants getting and not getting an offer. We show that those two groups are not statistically comparable. Therefore, the estimator arising from that comparison is inconsistent when the number of waitlists goes to infinity. We propose a new estimator, and show that it is consistent, provided the waitlists have at least two seats. Finally, we revisit an application, and we show that using our estimator can lead to significantly different results from those obtained using the commonly used estimator.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2019.