On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Accurately measuring heterogeneous effects is key to improving public policy design. We focus on predicting individual heterogeneity in linear random coefficients models, conditional on the sample. One application is estimating how sensitive each teacher’s value-added is to their knowledge of the program, conditional on the latter and their students’ test scores. We establish two new characterizations of these posterior effects, depending on whether the covariates are continuous or discrete. The first expresses these effects directly as a function of the data. Our associated series estimator is minimax adaptive, with various alternatives providing some robustness to the baseline assumptions. The second formulation characterizes the distribution of the random coefficients in terms of minimum distance, which is then used to compute the posterior. The associated estimator is consistent and implementable using optimal transport. Our methods reveal highly heterogeneous effects, identify the teachers most likely to benefit from training, thus providing tools to make personal development more cost-effective.