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Seminar

Causal Effects of Continuous Exposures in the Presence of Spatial Interference

Econometrics & Applied Microeconomcis Seminar

Add to calendar 2023-05-29 11:00 2023-05-29 12:15 Europe/Rome Causal Effects of Continuous Exposures in the Presence of Spatial Interference Seminar Room 3rd Floor Villa La Fonte YYYY-MM-DD
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When

29 May 2023

11:00 - 12:15 CEST

Where

Seminar Room 3rd Floor

Villa La Fonte

In this seminar, Joseph L. Antonelli will present the paper "Causal Effects of Continuous Exposures in the Presence of Spatial Interference: the Effects of Air Pollution on Public Health".
We develop new methodology to improve our understanding of the causal effects of multivariate air pollution exposures on public health. Typically, exposure to air pollution for an individual is measured at their home geographic region, though people travel to different regions with potentially different levels of air pollution. To account for this, we incorporate estimates of the mobility of individuals from cell phone mobility data to get an improved estimate of their exposure to air pollution. We treat this as an interference problem, where individuals in one geographic region can be affected by exposures in other regions due to mobility into those areas. We propose policy-relevant estimands and derive expressions showing the extent of bias one would obtain by ignoring this mobility. We additionally highlight the benefits of the proposed interference framework relative to a measurement error framework for accounting for mobility. We develop novel estimation strategies to estimate causal effects that account for this spatial spillover utilizing flexible, nonparametric Bayesian methodology. Empirically we find that this leads to substantially improved estimation of the causal effects of air pollution exposures over analyses that ignore spatial spillover caused by mobility.
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