10 -12 May 2022 (Tue to Thu) 9 to 11 am (Hong Kong Time)
sociology@cuhk.edu.hk
Conventional causal parameters, such as the average treatment effect (ATE), reflect how the mean outcome in a population or subpopulation would change if all units received treatment versus control. Real-world policy changes, however, are often incremental, changing the treatment status for only a small segment of the population who are at or near “the margin of participation.” To mimic real-world policy changes, two parallel lines of literature have developed in statistics/epidemiology and in economics/sociology that define, identify, and estimate what we call interventional effects and marginal interventional effects. The goal of this workshop is to introduce these two lines of literature, unify them under a common set of notation and definitions, propose new identification and estimation results that will be illustrated with two examples.
Workshop outline
Day 1 (May 10): Causal inference with observational data
Day 2 (May 11): Instrumental variables and marginal treatment effects
Day 3 (May 12): Interventional effects
Remarks
Maximum number of participants will be 30. Priority will be given to members and alumni of the Department of Sociology and those with prior training in the counterfactual approach to causal inference.
About the Speaker
Prof. Xiang Zhou is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His research broadly concerns inequality, education, causal inference, and computational methods. His work has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Political Economy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among other peer-reviewed journals. Before coming to Harvard, Zhou worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He received a PhD in Sociology and Statistics from the University of Michigan in 2015.