Distributional Impact Analysis: Toolkit and Illustrations of Impacts beyond the Average Treatment Effect

Guadalupe Bedoya (), Luca Bittarello, Jonathan Davis and Nikolas Mittag ()
Additional contact information
Guadalupe Bedoya: World Bank
Nikolas Mittag: CERGE-EI

No 11863, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Program evaluations often focus on average treatment effects. However, average treatment effects miss important aspects of policy evaluation, such as the impact on inequality and whether treatment harms some individuals. A growing literature develops methods to evaluate such issues by examining the distributional impacts of programs and policies. This toolkit reviews methods to do so, focusing on their application to randomized control trials. The paper emphasizes two strands of the literature: estimation of impacts on outcome distributions and estimation of the distribution of treatment impacts. The article then discusses extensions to conditional treatment effect heterogeneity, that is, to analyses of how treatment impacts vary with observed characteristics. The paper offers advice on inference, testing, and power calculations, which are important when implementing distributional analyses in practice. Finally, the paper illustrates select methods using data from two randomized evaluations.

Keywords: policy evaluation; distributional impact analysis; heterogeneous treatment effects; impacts on outcome distributions; distribution of treatment effects; random control trials (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C18 C21 C54 C93 D39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Working Paper: Distributional impact analysis: toolkit and illustrations of impacts beyond the average treatment effect (2017)
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