Estimating long-term effects without long-term data

It’s important to estimate the long-term impacts of our actions, but we often can’t observe long-term outcomes within a decision-relevant time frame. David Rhys Bernard, a PhD candidate at the Paris School of Economics, recently tested an alternative approach — measuring the short-term impacts of different interventions on a variety of “surrogate” outcomes, then using those outcomes to reach a long-term impact estimate. In this talk, he explains his findings and their implications.