gapclosing

Estimate Gaps Under an Intervention

Summary

Provides functions to estimate gap-closing estimands: the disparities across categories (e.g. Black and white) that persists if a treatment variable (e.g. college) is equalized. The purpose is to estimate the average outcomes that units would realize if exposed to a counterfactual treatment assignment rule.

The package will enable the user to:

• Estimate treatment and outcome prediction functions with Generalized Linear Models, Generalized Additive Models, ridge regression, or random forest
• Combine those in doubly-robust estimators of gap-closing estimands
• Produce confidence intervals by the bootstrap
• Visualize the result in plots

Installation instructions

Install from CRAN with one line: install.packages("gapclosing").

To install the latest development version,

1. First, install the devtools package: if(!require(devtools)) install.packages("devtools")
2. Then, install the gapclosing package with the command devtools::install_github("ilundberg/gapclosing").

Getting started

To get started, see the vignette. Also see the working paper for which this package is the software implementation.

Lundberg, Ian. Forthcoming. “The gap-closing estimand: A causal approach to study interventions that close disparities across social categories.” Sociological Methods and Research. Draft available at https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/gx4y3.