"In contemporary America, racial gaps in achievement are primarily due to gaps in skills. Skill gaps emerge early before children enter school. Families are major producers of those skills. Inequality in performance in school is strongly linked to inequality in family environments. Schools do...

This chapter relates the literature on the econometric evaluation of social programs to the literature in statistics on “causal inference”. In it, we develop a general evaluation framework that addresses well-posed economic questions and analyzes agent choice rules and subjective evaluations...

This paper examines the economic foundations of three criteria used for evaluating the costs and benefits of social programs. Some criteria do not consider the scale of programs or address the costs associated with programs that expand or contract the total government budget. A recent addition...