Welfare Analysis Meets Causal Inference
提出一个利用政策对政府净支出的因果估计进行实证福利分析的框架，通过构建边际公共资金价值（MVPF）来评估政策，并应用于公共财政、劳动、发展、贸易和产业组织等领域的经典实证案例。
We describe a frame work for empirical welfare analysis that uses the causal estimates of a policy’s impact on net government spending. This framework provides guidance for which causal effects are (and are not) needed for empirical welfare analysis of public policies. The key ingredient is the construction of each policy’s marginal value of public funds (MVPF). The MVPF is the ratio of beneficiaries’ willingness to pay for the policy to the net cost to the government. We discuss how the MVPF relates to “traditional” welfare analysis tools such as the marginal excess burden and marginal cost of public funds. We show how the MVPF can be used in practice by applying it to several canonical empirical applications from public finance, labor, development, trade, and industrial organization.