Estimating Person-Centered Treatment (PeT) Effects Using Instrumental Variables / Anirban Basu.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Basu, Anirban.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w18056.

NBER working paper series no. w18056

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Estimating Person-Centered Treatment

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2012.

Summary:

This paper builds on the methods of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil (1999, 2001, 2005) to estimate person-centered treatment (PeT) effects that are conditioned on the person's observed characteristics and averaged over the potential conditional distribution of unobserved characteristics that lead them to their observed treatment choices. PeT effects are more individualized than conditional treatment effects from a randomized setting with the same observed characteristics. PeT effects can be easily aggregated to construct any of the mean treatment effect parameters and, more importantly, are well-suited to comprehend individual-level treatment effect heterogeneity. The paper presents the theory behind PeT effects, studies their finite-sample properties using simulations and presents a novel analysis of treatment evaluation in health care.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2012.