This paper develops methods for evaluating marginal policy changes. We characterize how the effects of marginal policy changes depend on the direction of the policy change, and show that marginal policy effects are fundamentally easier to identify and to estimate than conventional treatment...

This paper provides new estimates of the medium and long-term impacts of Head Start on the health and behavioral problems of its participants. We identify these impacts using discontinuities in the probability of participation induced by program eligibility rules. Our strategy allows us to...

Using unique data from Pakistan we estimate a model of demand for differentiated products in 112 rural education markets with significant choice among public and private schools. Our model accounts for the endogeneity of school fees and the characteristics of students attending the school. As...

We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioral problems, grade repetition and obesity. We address the endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting it with variation in schooling costs during the mother's adolescence. Using...

We study the impact of increasing the time that the mother spends with her child in the first year of her life. In particular, we examine a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave entitlements in Norway. In response to this reform, maternal leave increased on average by 4 months...

This paper estimates average and marginal returns to schooling in Indonesia using a non-parametric selection model. Identification of the model is given by exogenous geographic variation in access to upper secondary schools. We find that the return to upper secondary schooling varies widely...

This paper extends the method of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil (1999, 2001, 2005) to the estimation of not only means, but also distributions of potential outcomes. The newly developed method is illustrated by applying it to changes in college enrollment and wage...

This paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the average quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000, resulting in a decrease of 8 percentage points in the college premium. The standard demand and supply framework (Katz and Murphy, 1992, Card...

This study examines the impact of publicly provided daycare for children aged 0-3 on outcomes of children and their caregivers over the course of seven years after enrollment into daycare. At the end of 2007, the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil used a lottery to assign children to limited...