1 option
Making the Most Out Of Social Experiments: Reducing the Intrinsic Uncertainty in Evidence from Randomized Trials with an Application to the JTPA Exp / Nancy Clements, James Heckman, Jeffrey Smith.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Clements, Nancy.
- Series:
- Technical Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. t0149.
- NBER technical working paper series no. t0149
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Social service--Evaluation.
- Social service.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Other Title:
- Making the Most Out Of Social Experiments
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 1994.
- Cambridge, Massachusetts : National Bureau of Economic Research, 1994.
- Summary:
- This paper demonstrates that even under ideal conditions, social experiments in general only uniquely determine the mean impacts of programs but not the median or the distribution of program impacts. The conventional common parameter evaluation model widely used in econometrics is one case where experiments uniquely determine joint the distribution of program impacts. That model assumes that everyone responds to a social program in the same way. Allowing for heterogeneous responses to programs, the data from social experiments are consistent with a wide variety of alternative impact distribution. We discuss why it is interesting to know the distribution of program impacts. We propose and implement a variety of different ways of incorporating prior information to reduce the wide variability intrinsic in experimental data. Robust Bayesian methods and deconvolution methods are developed and applied. We analyze earnings and employment data on adult women from a recent social experiment. In order to produce plausible impact distributions, it is necessary to impose strong positive dependence between outcomes in the treatment and in the control distributions. Such dependence is an outcome of certain optimizing models of the program participation decision.
- Notes:
- Print version record
- January 1994.
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.