The Royal Economic Society (RES) is pleased to announce that the 2024 Denis Sargan Econometrics Prize has been awarded to Rahul Singh (Harvard University) and Liyang Sun (University College London) for the article ‘Double robustness for complier parameters and a semi-parametric test for complier characteristics’.
The prize-winning paper was published in the January 2024 issue of The Econometrics Journal. You can read the full article Free to View here.
The Prize was awarded for the following reasons:
- The paper derives moment conditions for local average treatment effects (LATEs) and more general complier parameters that are doubly robust to misspecification of the outcome and treatment regressions involved and that can be used with regularised machine learning to control for high-dimensional covariates.
- The authors’ main contribution is to apply these to a specific complier parameter, the average value of the covariates among compliers. They develop tests for the equality of average complier characteristics across complier populations corresponding to different instruments and to the average characteristics in important reference populations: the full study population, the treated, and the untreated. This can be used to address to what extent LATE estimates are robust across instrument choices and relevant to policy decisions for broader reference populations.
- The authors provide a lucid account and careful analysis of the problem of measuring complier parameters in the presence of high-dimensional covariates. The proposed tests will be useful tools for empirical microeconomists.
The 2024 Denis Sargan Econometrics Prize winners Rahul Singh and Liyang Sun said:
The Prize is awarded for the best unsolicited article published in The Econometrics Journal in a given year by anyone who is within five years of having received their doctorate. The Prize may be awarded for articles coauthored with senior researchers, provided that the junior author(s) contributed at least equally. In those cases, the Prize is only given to the eligible, junior author(s).
The 2024 Denis Sargan Econometrics Prize will be presented to Rahul Singh and Liyang Sun on 1 July at the gala dinner of the annual Royal Economic Society Conference at the University of Birmingham.