Multi-valued treatment and the decomposition analysis on Evaluating the Workforce Investment Act Adult Program
2014/07/15
研討會日期 : 2014-07-15
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Ying-Ying Lee
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison at 2013. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research fields are Econometric Theory and Applied Econometrics.
演講摘要 : This paper studies how different lengths of participation in the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) Adult program affect participants' post-program wage outcomes. We explore the role of wage structure and participants' characteristics distribution associated with different lengths of participation in attributing to the difference in observed wage distributions. We propose an efficient propensity score weighting estimator for decomposition analysis that decomposes the differences in wage distributions for participants of different lengths of program participation into (1) wage-structure effect: arising due to the different wage structures associated with different lengths of participation, and (2) composition effect: arising due to different characteristics distributions for participants of different lengths of participation. These counterfactual effects reveal causal effects under the unconfoundedness assumption, such as treatment effects on the treated, where the multi-valued treatment variable is the length of participation. Our estimation results show that the heterogeneity in lengths of participation is an important dimension to evaluate the WIA Adult program and other social programs in which participation varies. The results of this paper, both theoretical and empirical, provide rigorous assessment of intervention programs and relevant suggestions to improve the performance and cost-effectiveness of these programs.
