Loss Aversion and the Welfare Ranking of Policy Interventions

Sergio Firpo, Antonio Galvao, Martyna Kobus (), Thomas Parker and Pedro Rosa-Dias ()
Additional contact information
Martyna Kobus: Institute of Economics, Polish Academy of Sciences
Pedro Rosa-Dias: Imperial College London

No 13176, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we develop theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. The new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of the distributions of policy-induced gains and losses. It applies to the class of welfare functions which model individual preferences with non-decreasing and loss-averse attitudes towards changes in outcomes. We also develop new statistical methods to test loss aversion-sensitive dominance in practice, using nonparametric plug-in estimates. We establish the limiting distributions of uniform test statistics by showing that they are directionally differentiable. This implies that inference can be conducted by a special resampling procedure. Since point-identification of the distribution of policy-induced gains and losses may require very strong assumptions, we also extend comparison criteria, test statistics, and resampling procedures to a partially-identified case. Finally, we illustrate our methods with an empirical application to welfare comparison of two income support programs.

Keywords: stochastic ordering; policy evaluation; loss aversion; welfare; directional differentiability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C12 C14 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67 pages
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen, nep-ore and nep-upt
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Published - published online in: Journal of Econometrics , 21 December 2023, 104543

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Working Paper: Loss aversion and the welfare ranking of policy interventions (2023)
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