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Loss aversion and the welfare ranking of policy interventions

Sergio Firpo, Antonio F. Galvao, Martyna Kobus, Thomas Parker, Pedro Rosa-Dias

arXiv 17 Apr 2020 · Econometrics · publishedJournal of Econometrics (2020)

arXiv:2004.08468 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of the distributions of policy-induced gains and losses. It applies to the class of welfare functions which model individual preferences with non-decreasing and loss-averse attitudes towards changes in outcomes. We also develop new statistical methods to test loss aversion-sensitive dominance in practice, using nonparametric plug-in estimates; these allow inference to be conducted through a special resampling procedure. Since point-identification of the distribution of policy-induced gains and losses may require strong assumptions, we extend our comparison criteria, test statistics, and resampling procedures to the partially-identified case. We illustrate our methods with a simple empirical application to the welfare comparison of alternative income support programs in the US.

Citation extraction

64
references
101
in-text mentions
64
distinct cited
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13,726
main-text words

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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Linton, Song, and Whang (2010) An Improved Bootstrap Test of Stochastic Dominance1.00073100%
2Fang and Santos (2019) Inference on Directionally Differentiable Functions0.9098375%
3Bitler, Gelbach, and Hoynes (2006) What Mean Impacts Miss: Distributional Effects of Welfare Reform Experiments0.87492100%
4Kahneman and Tversky (1979) Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk0.81142100%
5Linton, Maasoumi, and Whang (2005) Consistent Testing for Stochastic Dominance Under General Sampling Schemes0.81142100%
6van der Vaart and Wellner (1996) Weak Convergence and Empirical Processes0.6443267%
7Frank, Nelsen, and Schweizer (1987) Best-Possible Bounds for the Distribution of a Sum –- A Problem of Kolmogorov0.64422100%
8Makarov (1982) Estimates for the Distribution Function of a Sum of Two Random Variables when the Marginal Distributions are Fixed0.64422100%
9Rüschendorf (1982) Random Variables with Maximum Sums0.64422100%
10Rockafellar and Wets (1998) Variational Analysis0.5112250%

Showing the top 10 of 64 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Ranking Policies Under Loss Aversion and Inequality Aversion0.928105
2Debiased Machine Learning of Aggregated Intersection Bounds and Other Causal Parameters0.40511