Estimating long-term treatment effects without long-term outcome data
David Rhys Bernard (Paris School of Economics)
GPI Working Paper No. 11-2020
This paper has been awarded the paper prize of the 2019 Early Career Conference Programme.
Estimating long-term impacts of actions is important in many areas but the key difficulty is that long-term outcomes are only observed with a long delay. One alternative approach is to measure the effect on an intermediate outcome or a statistical surrogate and then use this to estimate the long-term effect. Athey et al. (2019) generalise the surrogacy method to work with multiple surrogates, rather than just one, increasing its credibility in social science contexts. I empirically test the multiple surrogates approach for long-term effect estimation in real-world conditions using long-run RCTs from development economics. In the context of conditional cash transfers for education in Colombia, I find that the method works well for predicting treatment effects over a 5-year time span but poorly over 10 years due to a reduced set of variables available when attempting to predict effects further into the future. The method is sensitive to observing appropriate surrogates.
Other working papers
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How should we weigh suffering against happiness? This paper highlights the existence of an argument from intuitively plausible axiological principles to the striking conclusion that in comparing different populations, there exists some depth of suffering that cannot be compensated for by any measure of well-being. In addition to a number of structural principles, the argument relies on two key premises. The first is the contrary of the so-called Reverse Repugnant Conclusion…
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The singularity hypothesis is a radical hypothesis about the future of artificial intelligence on which self-improving artificial agents will quickly become orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average human. Despite the ambitiousness of its claims, the singularity hypothesis has been defended at length by leading philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers. In this paper, I argue that the singularity hypothesis rests on scientifically implausible growth assumptions. …
Time Bias and Altruism – Leora Urim Sung (University College London)
We are typically near-future biased, being more concerned with our near future than our distant future. This near-future bias can be directed at others too, being more concerned with their near future than their distant future. In this paper, I argue that, because we discount the future in this way, beyond a certain point in time, we morally ought to be more concerned with the present well- being of others than with the well-being of our distant future selves. It follows that we morally ought to sacrifice…