This chapter uses the marginal treatment effect (MTE) to unify and organize the econometric literature on the evaluation of social programs. The marginal treatment effect is a choice-theoretic parameter that can be interpreted as a willingness to pay parameter for persons at a margin of...

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...