Working Paper
One of the main objectives of empirical analysis of experiments and quasi-experiments is to inform policy decisions that determine the allocation of treatments to individuals with different observable covariates. The authors propose the Empirical Welfare Maximization (EWM) method, which estimates a treatment assignment policy by maximizing the sample analog of average social welfare over a class of candidate treatment policies. The EWM approach is attractive in terms of both statistical performance and practical implementation in realistic settings of policy design.