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A Note on the Impact Evaluation of Public Policies: the Counterfactual Analysis

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A Note on the Impact Evaluation of Public Policies: the Counterfactual Analysis A note on the impact evaluation of public policies: the counterfactual analysis Massimo Loi and Margarida Rodrigues 2012 Report EUR 25519 EN 1 European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen Contact information Forename Surname Address: Joint Research Centre, Via Enrico Fermi 2749, TP 361, 21027 Ispra (VA), Italy E-mail: [email protected] Tel.: +39 0332 78 5633 Fax: +39 0332 78 5733 http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ Legal Notice Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission is responsible for the use which might be made of this publication. Europe Direct is a service to help you find answers to your questions about the European Union Freephone number (*): 00 800 6 7 8 9 10 11 (*) Certain mobile telephone operators do not allow access to 00 800 numbers or these calls may be billed. A great deal of additional information on the European Union is available on the Internet. It can be accessed through the Europa server http://europa.eu/. JRC74778 EUR 25519 EN ISBN 978-92-79-26425-2 ISSN 1831-9424 doi:10.2788/50327 Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2012 © European Union, 2012 Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged. Printed in Italy Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 4 2. Basic concepts ......................................................................................................................... 6 2.1 Policy intervention ................................................................................................................ 6 2.2 Causality ................................................................................................................................ 6 2.3 Randomised experiments vs. quasi-experiments .................................................................. 7 2.4 The fundamental evaluation problem .................................................................................... 9 2.5 Formalising the counterfactual approach .............................................................................. 9 2.6 Average treatment effect ..................................................................................................... 10 2.7 Selection bias....................................................................................................................... 11 3. Conditions for assessing the causal effect of public policies ................................................ 12 3.1 Stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) .............................................................. 12 3.2 Common support ................................................................................................................. 13 4. Balancing methods ................................................................................................................ 13 5. Propensity score matching (PSM) ......................................................................................... 14 5.1 Implementation steps........................................................................................................... 15 5.2 Selected applications ........................................................................................................... 18 5.3 Synthesis: main hypotheses, data requirements, pros and cons .......................................... 23 6. Regression discontinuity design (RDD) ................................................................................ 24 6.1 Implementation steps........................................................................................................... 26 6.2 Selected applications ........................................................................................................... 28 6.3 Synthesis: main hypotheses, data requirements, pros and cons .......................................... 31 7. Difference-in-Differences (DID) ........................................................................................... 32 7.1 Implementation steps........................................................................................................... 34 7.2 Selected Applications .......................................................................................................... 35 7.3 Synthesis: main hypotheses, data requirements, pros and cons .......................................... 39 8. Instrumental Variables (IV) ................................................................................................... 40 8.1 Implementation steps........................................................................................................... 42 8.2 Selected Applications .......................................................................................................... 43 8.3 Synthesis: main hypotheses, data requirements, pros and cons .......................................... 47 9. Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 48 References ..................................................................................................................................... 50 3 1. Introduction Public policies or interventions are implemented with the expectation of improving the situation of the individuals affected by them, but the extent to which they do so can only be assessed by undertaking an adequate policy evaluation exercise. Consider the example of publicly-provided training programmes offered to unemployed individuals, aiming at updating and increasing the participants’ skills and hopefully contributing significantly to their probability of finding a job. Measuring the effect of these programmes on an individual’s future employability may seem, at a first glance, a simple exercise, but in fact it is not a trivial task. Should the outcomes of the participants be compared to their pre-programme situations? Or instead, should the outcomes of the participants be compared with those of the non-participants? What if none of these alternatives are correct? What is the best approach to measure the effect of the programme on the outcomes of participants? This report aims to present the policy evaluation framework, to explain why the two approaches just proposed are usually wrong and to describe four counterfactual evaluation methods currently used to measure policy effects. The need to quantitatively identify the effects of a policy is nowadays indisputable, as it allows the measurement of its real effects and a comparison with the expected ones. Furthermore, the policy evaluation exercise gives essential and irreplaceable evidence for future policies in the same area. As such, it is an important ex-ante policy impact assessment tool, provided that past interventions and contextual situations are similar to the ones under consideration. As a result, in the recent decades the policy evaluation literature has gained increasing importance and new methodologies have been developed to identify the causal policy effects. The aim of policy evaluation is to measure the causal effect of a policy on outcomes of interest, on which it is expected to have an impact. The policy’s causal effect is defined as the difference between the outcome of the units affected by the policy (the actual situation) and the outcome that these same units would experience had the policy not been implemented. The fundamental evaluation problem is that we cannot observe simultaneously the same unit in the two scenarios, i.e. the scenario in which the policy is not implemented – the counterfactual – is an elusive one to produce or simulate. What is needed is an adequate control group that is as similar as possible to the affected one, so that the policy effect can be identified by the comparison between the outcomes of these two groups. Finding such a control group is not an easy task. An analyst may be tempted by one of the two following naïve approaches: i) comparing the outcome of interest of the affected units before and after the intervention; and ii) comparing units affected by the intervention with those not affected. However, neither approach will identify the policy causal effect. In the former case, 4 the outcome of interest might have been affected by factors, other than the policy, which changed over time. Therefore it is possible that the policy had an effect on the outcome even if the outcome did not change or, on the contrary, that the effect was null even if the outcome did change over time. The latter approach is also in general not suitable because affected and unaffected units are typically different even in the absence of the policy. This is particularly the case when the policy is targeted towards a specific population or when the units can select themselves into participation. The counterfactual analysis methodologies aim at identifying an adequate control group and, as a consequence, the counterfactual outcome and the policy effect. These methods became the standard approach to identify the causal policy effects in most institutions and international organizations in the last decades, with the World Bank playing a leading role 1. However, the European Commission uses the counterfactual analysis somewhat parsimoniously in its evaluation and ex-ante policy impact assessment guidelines, which still rely on simple impact indicators
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