Identifying Socially Disruptive Policies

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Auerbach, Eric, Cai, Yong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Auerbach, Eric
Cai, Yong
author_facet Auerbach, Eric
Cai, Yong
contents Social disruption occurs when a policy creates or destroys many network connections between agents. It is a costly side effect of many interventions and so a growing empirical literature recommends measuring and accounting for social disruption when evaluating the welfare impact of a policy. However, there is currently little work characterizing what can actually be learned about social disruption from data in practice. In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying social disruption in an experimental setting. We show that social disruption is not generally point identified, but informative bounds can be constructed by rearranging the eigenvalues of the marginal distribution of network connections between pairs of agents identified from the experiment. We apply our bounds to the setting of Banerjee et al. (2021) and find large disruptive effects that the authors miss by only considering regression estimates.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_15000
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifying Socially Disruptive Policies
Auerbach, Eric
Cai, Yong
Econometrics
Methodology
Social disruption occurs when a policy creates or destroys many network connections between agents. It is a costly side effect of many interventions and so a growing empirical literature recommends measuring and accounting for social disruption when evaluating the welfare impact of a policy. However, there is currently little work characterizing what can actually be learned about social disruption from data in practice. In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying social disruption in an experimental setting. We show that social disruption is not generally point identified, but informative bounds can be constructed by rearranging the eigenvalues of the marginal distribution of network connections between pairs of agents identified from the experiment. We apply our bounds to the setting of Banerjee et al. (2021) and find large disruptive effects that the authors miss by only considering regression estimates.
title Identifying Socially Disruptive Policies
topic Econometrics
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15000