Original source
An Adaptive Targeted Field Experiment: Job Search Assistance for Refugees in Jordan
Preprint · 4 May 2023
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Used in these cards
Adversarial Non-Stationarity Bounds in Multi-Armed Bandits
"Remarkably, bandit algorithms (such as Thompson sampling) are able to achieve worst-case average regret (relative to any fixed treatment or targeted assignment policy) on the order of $1/\sqrt{T}$ (up to logarithmic terms)."
Expert Forecast Overoptimism
"Relative to our estimated treatment effects, local staff were very optimistic in their forecasts: at the median, they predicted employment rates of 20%, 10% and 9% for the cash, information and nudge interventions respectively..."
Frequentist Variance Bounding in Adaptive Trials
"Our frequentist (i.e., ex-ante, worst-case) constraint in the experiment is that $max_x max_{\theta_0} p^x Var_{\theta_0}(\overline{Y}^{dx}) \le \lambda$... This allows the designer to target participant welfare while ensuring that she can learn something about the effectiveness of suboptimal treatments."
Goal-Setting Job-Search Nudge
"Through the calendar and the SMSs, participants track the number of jobs they intend to apply for and hours of job search they intend to spend, and can then check whether they met their goals for the week."
Host-Refugee Labor Market Friction Asymmetry
"We find essentially no positive effects of treatment on the Jordanian sample. The Syrians and Jordanians who take part in our study differ on multiple dimensions at baseline, and their outcomes evolve in different ways over time."
The Jordan Compact
"In exchange for trade concessions and access to conditional financing, the Government of Jordan committed to important policy changes aimed at improving access of Syrian refugees to the labor market."
Labeled Cash Transfers for Refugee Job Search
"As a result, four months after treatment, the grant boosts employment by 3.8 percentage points (70 percent) and earnings by 65 percent."
Myopic Stopping Rules for Adaptive Field Experiments
"The net return is given by the sum of the weighted average of expected participant welfare net of costs... and the expected decrease of treatment effect estimator variance... Continue the experiment if and only if this expected net return exceeds 0."
Statistical Surrogacy in Sequential Policy Trials
"This condition requires that the long-term outcome should be independent of the treatment assignment conditional on observable characteristics X and short-run outcomes."
Tempered Thompson Algorithm
"Our Tempered Thompson Algorithm combines the estimation objective of conventional RCTs with the welfare-maximizing objective of bandit algorithms."
Trusted Enumerator Data Collection in Vulnerable Populations
"ESO surveys were conducted by staff members familiar to the respondents, whereas the rapid-response surveys were conducted by someone whom the respondents had not previously met. It is thus likely that many respondents, and particularly Syrian refugees, had more trust in the ESO enumerators, and hence were more likely to discuss informal work with them."
Welfare Contrasts in Policy Choice
"We estimate that the optimal targeted policy has a treatment effect on six-week employment that is one percentage point larger than the optimal non-targeted policy..."