Comparing Experimental and Matching Methods using a Large-Scale Field Experiment on Voter Mobilization |
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| 文献名称 | Comparing Experimental and Matching Methods using a Large-Scale Field Experiment on Voter Mobilization | ||||||
| 文献作者 | Kevin Arceneaux , Alan S. Gerber , Donald P. Green | ||||||
| 作者所在单位 | |||||||
| 文献分类 | 已发表文献 | ||||||
| 学科一级分类 | 经济 | ||||||
| 学科二级分类 | 行为与实验经济学 | ||||||
| 文献摘要 |
Randomized experimentation is the optimal research design for establishing causation. However, for a number of practical reasons, researchers are sometimes unable to conduct experiments and must rely on observational studies. In an effort to develop estimators that can approximate experimental results using observational data, scholars have given increasing attention to matching and closely related methods such as propensity score matching. In this paper, we test the performance of matching by gauging the success with which matching approximates experimental results. The voter mobilization experiment presented here comprises a large number of observations (60,000 randomly assigned to the treatment group and nearly two million assigned to the control group) and a rich set of covariates. This study is analyzed in two ways. The first method, instrumental variables estimation, takes advantage of random assignment in order to produce consistent estimates. The second method, matching estimation, ignores random assignment and analyzes the data as though they were nonexperimental. Matching is found to produce biased results in this application. The experimental findings show that brief paid get-out-the-vote phone calls do not increase turnout, while matching estimators show a significant positive effect. |
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| 参考文献 |
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| 关键字 | Field Experiment | ||||||
| 发表所在刊物（或来源） | Political Analysis, 2006，Volume14, Issue1Pp. 37-62 | ||||||
| 发表时间 | 2006 | ||||||
| 适用研究领域 | |||||||
| 评论 | |||||||
| 上传时间 | 2011-1-30 12:30 | ||||||
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