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Inference for the Marginal Value of Public Funds

Vedant Vohra

arXiv 30 Sep 2024 · Econometrics

arXiv:2410.00217 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Economists often estimate causal effects of policies on multiple outcomes and summarize them into scalar measures of cost-effectiveness or welfare, such as the Marginal Value of Public Funds (MVPF). In many settings, microdata underlying these estimates are unavailable, leaving researchers with only published estimates and their standard errors. We develop tools for valid inference on functions of causal effects, such as the MVPF, when the correlation structure is unknown. Our approach is to construct worst-case confidence intervals, leveraging experimental designs to tighten them, and to assess robustness using breakdown analyses. We illustrate our method with MVPFs for eight policies.

Citation extraction

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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 64% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

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
1Cynthia Miller, Lawrence F Katz, Gilda Azurdia, Adam Isen \ Caroline… (2017) Expanding the earned income tax credit for workers without dependent children: Interim findings from the paycheck plus demonstra…0.8434375%
2Nathaniel Hendren \ Ben Sprung-Keyser (2020) A unified welfare analysis of government policies0.82723557%
3Matthew D Cocci \ Mikkel Plagborg-Mller (2024) Standard errors for calibrated parameters0.7946350%
4Gal Wettstein (2020) Retirement lock and prescription drug insurance: Evidence from medicare part d0.64410240%
5E Jason Baron \ Max Gross (2022) Is there a foster care-to-prison pipeline? Evidence from quasi-randomly assigned investigators0.6444250%
6Po-Chun Huang \ Tzu-Ting Yang (2021) The welfare effects of extending unemployment benefits: Evidence from re-employment and unemployment transfers0.6444250%
7Arnold Zellner (1962) An efficient method of estimating seemingly unrelated regressions and tests for aggregation bias0.64422100%
8Graham Elliott, Ulrich K Müller \ Mark W Watson (2015) Nearly optimal tests when a nuisance parameter is present under the null hypothesis0.5112250%
lewandowski2009generatingunmatched citation key lewandowski2009generating0.5112250%
10Joseph P Romano \ EL Lehmann (2005) Testing statistical hypotheses0.5112250%

Showing the top 10 of 27 scored citations. 1 of these could not be matched to a bibliography entry, so only the citation key is shown.

Cited by, within the corpus

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

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Bounds for Standard Errors in Combined Data0.51121