Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - 4:00pm to Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - 4:55pm
Event Calendar Category
IDSS
Speaker Name
Kosuke Imai
Affiliation
Harvard University
Building and Room number
E18-304
Abstract
In many social science experiments, subjects often interact with each other and as a result, one unit’s treatment can influence the outcome of another unit. Over the last decade, significant progress has been made towards causal inference in the presence of such interference between units. In this talk, we will discuss two-stage randomized experiments, which enable the identification of the average spillover effects as well as that of the average direct effect of one’s own treatment. In particular, we consider the setting with noncompliance, in which some units in the treatment group do not receive the treatment while others in the control group may take up one. This implies that there may exist the spillover effect of the treatment assignment on the treatment receipt as well as the spillover effect of the treatment receipt on the outcome. To address this complication, we generalize the instrumental variables method by allowing for interference between units and show how to identify the average compiler direct effect. We also establish the connections between our nonparametric randomization-inference approach and the two-stage least squares regression. The proposed methodology is motivated by and applied to an ongoing randomized evaluation of India’s National Health Insurance Program (RSBY). Joint work with Zhichao Jiang and Anup Malani.
Biography
Kosuke Imai is Professor in the Department of Government and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. He is also an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science where his primary office is located. Before moving to Harvard in 2018, Imai taught at Princeton University for 15 years where he was the founding director of the Program in Statistics and Machine Learning. He specializes in the development of statistical methods and their applications to social science research and is the author of Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2017). Outside of Harvard, Imai is currently serving as the President of the Society for Political Methodology. He is also Professor of Visiting Status in the Graduate Schools of Law and Politics at The University of Tokyo.