Evaluating the Impact of Regulatory Policies on Social Welfare in Difference-in-Difference Settings

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Autori principali: Ghanem, Dalia, Kédagni, Désiré, Mourifié, Ismael
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Ghanem, Dalia
Kédagni, Désiré
Mourifié, Ismael
author_facet Ghanem, Dalia
Kédagni, Désiré
Mourifié, Ismael
contents Quantifying the impact of regulatory policies on social welfare generally requires the identification of counterfactual distributions. Many of these policies (e.g. minimum wages or minimum working time) generate mass points and/or discontinuities in the outcome distribution. Existing approaches in the difference-in-difference literature cannot accommodate these discontinuities while accounting for selection on unobservables and non-stationary outcome distributions. We provide a unifying partial identification result that can account for these features. Our main identifying assumption is the stability of the dependence (copula) between the distribution of the untreated potential outcome and group membership (treatment assignment) across time. Exploiting this copula stability assumption allows us to provide an identification result that is invariant to monotonic transformations. We provide sharp bounds on the counterfactual distribution of the treatment group suitable for any outcome, whether discrete, continuous, or mixed. Our bounds collapse to the point-identification result in Athey and Imbens (2006) for continuous outcomes with strictly increasing distribution functions. We illustrate our approach and the informativeness of our bounds by analyzing the impact of an increase in the legal minimum wage using data from a recent minimum wage study (Cengiz et al 2019).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_04494
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating the Impact of Regulatory Policies on Social Welfare in Difference-in-Difference Settings
Ghanem, Dalia
Kédagni, Désiré
Mourifié, Ismael
Econometrics
Quantifying the impact of regulatory policies on social welfare generally requires the identification of counterfactual distributions. Many of these policies (e.g. minimum wages or minimum working time) generate mass points and/or discontinuities in the outcome distribution. Existing approaches in the difference-in-difference literature cannot accommodate these discontinuities while accounting for selection on unobservables and non-stationary outcome distributions. We provide a unifying partial identification result that can account for these features. Our main identifying assumption is the stability of the dependence (copula) between the distribution of the untreated potential outcome and group membership (treatment assignment) across time. Exploiting this copula stability assumption allows us to provide an identification result that is invariant to monotonic transformations. We provide sharp bounds on the counterfactual distribution of the treatment group suitable for any outcome, whether discrete, continuous, or mixed. Our bounds collapse to the point-identification result in Athey and Imbens (2006) for continuous outcomes with strictly increasing distribution functions. We illustrate our approach and the informativeness of our bounds by analyzing the impact of an increase in the legal minimum wage using data from a recent minimum wage study (Cengiz et al 2019).
title Evaluating the Impact of Regulatory Policies on Social Welfare in Difference-in-Difference Settings
topic Econometrics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04494