Publications by Golub Capital Social Impact Lab

Using generalized random forests and rich Swedish administrative data, we show that the earnings effects of job displacement due to establishment closures are extremely heterogeneous across workers, establishments, and markets. The decile of…

Forest-based methods have recently gained in popularity for non-parametric treatment effect estimation. Building on this line of work, we introduce causal survival forests, which can be used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in survival…

Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate any…

Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate any…

Online platforms often face challenges being both fair (i.e., non-discriminatory) and efficient (i.e., maximizing revenue). Using computer vision algorithms and observational data from a microlending marketplace, we find that choices made by…

Randomized clinical trials (RCT) are the gold standard for informing treatment decisions. Observational studies are often plagued by selection bias, and expert-selected covariates may insufficiently adjust for confounding. We explore how…

Causal inference has recently attracted substantial attention in the machine learning and artificial intelligence community. It is usually positioned as a distinct strand of research that can broaden the scope of machine learning from predictive…

This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer’s utility is additive in the…

We estimate a measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from smartphones, we…

We develop new semiparametric methods for estimating treatment effects. We focus on a setting where the outcome distributions may be thick tailed, where treatment effects are small, where sample sizes are large and where assignment is completely…

Long-acting reversible contraceptives are highly effective in preventing unintended pregnancies, but take-up remains low. This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of interventions addressing two barriers to long-acting reversible…

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, pharmaceutical treatment hypotheses have abounded, each requiring careful evaluation. A randomized controlled trial generally provides the most credible evaluation of a treatment, but the efficiency…

Breiman’s “Two Cultures” paper painted a picture of two disciplines, data modeling, and algorithmic machine learning, both engaged in the analyses of data but talking past each other. Although that may have been true at the time, there is now…

In severe viral pneumonia, including Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the viral replication phase is often followed by hyperinflammation, which can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome, multi-organ failure, and death. We previously…

We study the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, in which the algorithm must balance the bias-variance trade-off for model estimation while also balancing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. In this paper, we propose the first…

Computational social science is more than just large repositories of digital data and the computational methods needed to construct and analyze them. It also represents a convergence of different fields with different ways of thinking about and…

In this paper we study estimation of and inference for average treatment effects in a setting with panel data. We focus on the setting where units, e.g., individuals, firms, or states, adopt the policy or treatment of interest at a particular…

Effective therapies for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are urgently needed, and pre-clinical data suggest alpha-1 adrenergic receptor antagonists (α1-AR antagonists) may be effective in reducing mortality related to hyperinflammation…

Adaptive experiments present a unique opportunity to more rapidly learn which of many treatments work best, evaluate multiple hypotheses, and optimize for several objectives. For example, they can be used to pilot a large number of potential…

In medicine, randomized clinical trials are the gold standard for informing treatment decisions. Observational comparative effectiveness research is often plagued by selection bias, and expert-selected covariates may not be sufficient to adjust…

Alpha 1–adrenergic receptor blocking agents (α1-blockers) have been reported to have protective benefits against hyperinflammation and cytokine storm syndrome, conditions that are associated with mortality in patients with coronavirus disease…

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example,…

Random forests are a powerful method for non-parametric regression, but are limited in their ability to fit smooth signals. Taking the perspective of random forests as an adaptive kernel method, we pair the forest kernel with a local linear…

The novel disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19) has been a shock to both our health and wealth, with more than 276,000 dead in the U.S. and economic disruption that some have estimated as high as more than $16 trillion. These…