Econometric Evaluation of Social Programs, Part III: Distributional Treatment Effects, Dynamic Treatment Effects, Dynamic Discrete Choice, and General Equilibrium Policy Evaluation

This chapter develops three topics. (1) Identification of the distributions of treatment effects and the distributions of agent subjective evaluations of treatment effects. Methods for identifying ex ante and ex post distributions are presented and empirical examples are given. (2) Identification of dynamic treatment effects. The relationship between the statistical literature on dynamic causal inference based on sequential-randomization and the dynamic discrete-choice literature is exposited. The value of well posed economic choice models for decision making under uncertainty in analyzing and interpreting dynamic intervention studies is developed. A survey of the dynamic discrete-choice literature is presented. (3) The key ideas and papers in the recent literature on general equilibrium evaluations of social programs are summarized.