arXiv subjects

Joël Terschuur

Publications and source records attributed to Joël Terschuur.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Locally Robust Policy Learning: Inequality, Inequality of Opportunity and Intergenerational Mobility

Policy makers need to decide whether to treat or not to treat heterogeneous individuals. The optimal treatment choice depends on the welfare function that the policy maker has in mind and it is referred to as the policy learning problem. I study a general setting for policy learning with semiparametric Social Welfare Functions (SWFs) that can be estimated by locally robust/orthogonal moments based on U-statistics. This rich class of SWFs substantially expands the setting in Athey and Wager (2021) and accommodates a wider range of distributional preferences. Three main applications of the general theory motivate the paper: (i) Inequality aware SWFs, (ii) Inequality of Opportunity aware SWFs and (iii) Intergenerational Mobility SWFs. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to assess the effect of attending preschool on adult earnings and estimate optimal policy rules based on parental years of education and parental income.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2023

Educational Inequality of Opportunity and Mobility in Europe

Educational attainment generates labor market returns, societal gains and has intrinsic value for individuals. We study Inequality of Opportunity (IOp) and intergenerational mobility in the distribution of educational attainment. We propose to use debiased IOp estimators based on the Gini coefficient and the Mean Logarithmic Deviation (MLD) which are robust to machine learning biases. We also measure the effect of each circumstance on IOp, we provide tests to compare IOp in two populations and to test joint significance of a group of circumstances. We find that circumstances explain between 38\% and 74\% of total educational inequality in European countries. Mother's education is the most important circumstance in most countries. There is high intergenerational persistence and there is evidence of an educational Great Gatsby curve. We also construct IOp aware educational Great Gatsby curves and find that high income IOp countries are also high educational IOp and less mobile countries.

econ.EM↗