Ying-Ying Lee, UC Irvine - April 26, 2019

April 26, 2019

Ying-Ying Lee, UC Irvine will present a seminar at 3:00 PM in Arts 807

Seminar Title: Multivalued Treatments and Decomposition Analysis: An application to the WIA Program

Abstract:

This paper provides a general estimation and inference framework to study how different types or levels of program participation affect participants’ outcomes. We decompose differences in the outcome distribution into (i) a wage structure (or schedule) effect, arising due to the conditional outcome distributions associated with different levels of participation; and (ii) a composition effect, arising due to differences in the distributions of observable characteristics. These counterfactual differences are equivalent to the multivalued treatment effects for the treated under a conditional independence assumption, such as the average/quantile treatment effects for the treated. We propose efficient nonparametric estimators based on propensity score weighting together with uniform inference theory. We employ our methods to study the effects of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) programs. We find that heterogeneity in levels of program participation is an important dimension to evaluate the WIA and other social programs in which participation varies. The results of this paper, both theoretically and empirically, provide rigorous assessment of intervention programs and relevant suggestions to improve their performance and cost-effectiveness.