Rowley, Jeffrey;
(2024)
Econometric models of treatment with application to labour market outcomes.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Preview |
Text
Rowley_Thesis.pdf - Other Download (4MB) | Preview |
Abstract
This thesis is concerned with the related problems of whether individuals benefit from treatment and determining who should receive treatment—both from an empirical and a theoretical viewpoint—and is broadly divided into two parts (with Chapter A outlining the notation that is used throughout). The first part is mainly theoretical and examines the problem of how to allocate individuals to treatment in order to maximise a welfare criterion. Chapter B collects several results pertaining to modified Bessel functions of the first kind that are then used in Chapter C to derive a characterisation of the statistical divergence of a von Mises-Fisher distribution and its asymptotic behaviour. Chapter D develops a frame work for estimating stochastic—rather than deterministic—assignment rules that are drawn from von Mises-Fisher distributions. This method for estimating assignment rules is motivated by a variational Bayes approximation of the infeasible optimal posterior distribution (i.e., the optimal stochastic assign ment rule). The optimal posterior distribution is obtained from the maintained prior via an updating procedure that is based upon an empirical welfare criterion and that reflects the objective of a utilitarian social planner with access to the results of a randomised control trial or otherwise suitable data. The use of stochastic assignment rules has strong theoretical justification, and the proposed method is shown to achieve low regret with high probability. Experimental data from the National Job Training Partnership Act Study is used to illustrate the implementation and performance of this framework. The second part is mainly empirical and examines the problem of identifying how additional children affect maternal labour supply. Chapter E studies a model of maternal behaviour that allows for a rich set of behaviours by mothers and that is applicable to a range of other empirical problems. Census (and related) data is used to estimate whether maternal labour supply increases or decreases in the presence of additional children.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Econometric models of treatment with application to labour market outcomes |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Economics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10186643 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
