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 formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baselinepretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

This paper develops and applies a Bayesian approach to Exploratory Factor Analysis that improves on ad hoc classical approaches. Our framework relies on dedicated factor models and simultaneously determines the number of factors, the allocation of each measurement to a unique factor, and the...

Consider two heterogenous populations of agents who, when matched, jointly produce an output, Y. For example, teachers and classrooms of students together produce achievement, parents raise children, whose life outcomes vary in adulthood, assembly plant managers and workers produce a certain...

In social and economic networks linked agents often share additional links in common. There are two competing explanations for this phenomenon. First, agents may have a structural taste for transitive links - the returns to linking may be higher if two agents share links in common. Second,...