OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, 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.