Contributo su “The Stata Journal”

Giovanni Cerulli segnala l’uscita dell’articolo “Optimal policy learning using Stata”  sulla rivista The Stata Journal (Sage). L’articolo rientra tra i prodotti di disseminazione del progetto FOSSR – Fostering Open Science in Social Science Research  di cui Giovanni è il coordinatore scientifico.

In this article, I introduce the package opl for optimal policy learning, facilitating ex ante policy impact evaluation within the Stata environment. Despite theoretical progress, practical implementations of policy-learning algorithms are still poor within popular statistical software. To address this limitation, opl implements three popular policy-learning algorithms in Stata—threshold based, linear combination, and fixed-depth decision tree—and provides practical demonstrations of them using a real dataset. I also present policy-scenario development proposing a menu strategy, which is particularly useful when selection variables are affected by welfare monotonicity. Overall, this article contributes to bridging the gap between theoretical advancements and practical applications in the field of policy learning.