Evaluating Programmes: Experiments, Non-Experiments and Propensity Scores

Denis Conniffe, Vanessa Gash and Philip J. O'Connell
Additional contact information
Philip J. O'Connell: Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)

No WP126, Papers from Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)

Abstract: Evaluations of programmes ?for example, labour market interventions such as employment schemes and training courses- usually involve comparison of the performance of a treatment group (recipients of the programme) with a control group (non-recipients) as regards some response (gaining employment for example). But the idea of randomisation of individuals to groups is rarely possible in the social sciences and there may be substantial differences between groups in the distribution of individual characteristics than can affect response. Past practice in economics has been to try to use multiple regression models to adjust away the differences in observed characteristics, while also testing for sample selection bias. The Propensity Score approach, which is widely applied in epidemiology and related fields, focuses on the idea that ?matching? individuals in the groups should be compared. The appropriate matching measure is usually taken to be the prior probability of programme participation. This paper describes the key ideas of the Propensity Score method, compares it with the common approach in economics, reviews the arguments in the literature and illustrates application by reanalysis of some Irish data on training courses.

Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2000-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.esri.ie/pubs/WP126.pdf First version, 2000 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esr:wpaper:wp126

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Burns ().