Removing the Veil of Ignorance in Assessing the Distributional Impacts of Social Policies

By Pedro Carneiro, Karsten Hansen, James J. Heckman. Social Science Research Network, 2002

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs. This research advances the economic policy evaluation literature beyond estimating assorted mean impacts to estimate distributions of outcomes generated by different policies and determine how those policies shift persons across the distributions of potential outcomes produced by them. Our approach enables analysts to evaluate the distributional effects of social programs without invoking the “Veil of Ignorance” assumption often used in the literature in applied welfare economics. Our methods determine which persons are affected by a given policy, where they come from in the ex-ante outcome distribution and what their gains are. We apply our methods to analyze two proposed policy reforms in American education. These reforms benefit the middle class and not the poor.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20495ca7798fbc910e6a0b9953f5354ba20514bd

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. James J. Heckman
2. Flávio Cunha
3. Pedro Carneiro
4. E. Vytlacil
5. Le Wang
6. Magne Mogstad
7. Esfandiar Maasoumi
8. A. Aakvik

In Gender Studies

1. James J. Heckman
2. Flávio Cunha
3. Pedro Carneiro
4. Esfandiar Maasoumi
5. Le Wang
6. E. Vytlacil
7. A. Aakvik
8. Magne Mogstad

In Sociology and Political Science

1. James J. Heckman
2. Flávio Cunha
3. E. Vytlacil
4. Pedro Carneiro
5. Le Wang
6. Esfandiar Maasoumi
7. Lance Lochner
8. Arthur Lewbel

Citations in the corpus

• Estimating treatment effects for discrete outcomes when responses to treatment vary: an application to Norwegian vocational rehabilitation programs (2005, background): “(2005) emphasize that many criteria for the evaluation of social programs require information on the distribution of treatment effects. See also Carneiro et al., (2001) .”
• Identifying and Estimating the Distributions of Ex Post and Ex Ante Returns to Schooling (2007, background): “See Carneiro, Hansen, and Heckman (2001, 2003), Cunha, Heckman, and Navarro (2005, 2006) and Cunha and Heckman (2006) for examples of this work.”
• The Gender Gap between Earnings Distributions (2019, methodology): “Following Carneiro et al. (2001), we consider decision theoretic implications of various gap functions.”
• Estimating Distributions of Treatment Effects with an Application to the Returns to Schooling and Measurement of the Effects of Uncertainty on College Choice (2003, unknown): “To reduce this arbitrariness and render greater interpretability to estimates obtained from our model, we adjoin a measurement system to choice equations (8) and outcome system (11).”
• Human Capital Policy (2003, background): “Panel D specification adds AFQT and an AFQT-Tuition interaction to Source: Cameron and Heckman (1999) (2) Blacks the baseline specification.”
• Modeling Ordered Choices: A Primer and Recent Developments (2008, unknown): “…injury severity in car accidents [Eluru et al. (2008)], • drug reactions [Fu et al.(2004)], • duration [Ridder (1990)], • education [Machin and Vignoles (2005), Carneiro et al. (2001, 2003), Cameron and Heckman (1998)], • eye disease severity [Biswas and Das (2002)], • happiness [Winkelmann…”
• Compensating variation and Hicksian choice probabilities in random utility models that are nonlinear in income (2005, background): “For more discussion on this issue, see Heckman and Honoré (1990), McFadden (1999) and Carneiro et al. (2001).”