Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Public Finance Assignemnt
Public Finance Assignemnt
Methods:
Randomization.
As the participants are randomly assigned to program makes it possible
to measure the effect by simply comparing the outcomes of those
assigned to the treatment those that were not. The counterfactual in
randomization is represented by the comparison group or control
group, which is selected randomly before the start of the program,
among a group of potential participants. Randomized evaluations are
often referred to as the “gold standard” in impact evaluations. Both
treatment and comparison groups are in expectation statistically
identical along both observable and unobservable characteristics. It is
also important that no other treatment is applied to one group and not
to the other. Drawback of randomized evaluation is that the random
assignment has to be done before the program, and as a result, it is not
possible to carry out retrospective randomized evaluations. The validity
of method depends on how similar the treatment group is to the
control group before the intervention.
Difference-in-Differences Estimations
A difference-in-differences evaluation is a combination of simple
difference and pre-post evaluation method. The effect is calculated by
measuring the change over time for the treated group and for the
comparison group and then taking the difference between these two
differences. The key assumption of this method is the assumption of
common trends. The benefit of this method is it controls for all the
characteristics that do not change over time (both observable and
unobservable) and for all the changes over time that affect the treated
and untreated group in the same manner. The drawback is that it is
typically impossible to assess whether the two groups would have
developed in the same way in the absence of the program. If this is not
the case, the analysis will be biased.
HAMZA USMAN BSPA 5TH
Matching methods