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...

We use the control function approach to identify the average treatment effect and the effect of treatment on the treated in models with a continuous endogenous regressor whose impact is heterogeneous. We assume a stochastic polynomial restriction on the form of the heterogeneity, but unlike...

Semiparametric methods are developed to estimate the bias that arises from using nonexperimental comparison groups to evaluate social programs and to test the identifying assumptions that justify matching, selection models and the method of difference in differences. Using data from an...

This paper investigates four topics. (1) It examines the different roles played by the propensity score (the probability of selection into treatment) in matching, instrumental variable, and control function methods. (2) It contrasts the roles of exclusion restrictions in matching and selection...

One current educational reform seeks to reward the "value added" by teachers and schools based on the average change in pupil test scores over time. In this paper, we outline the conditions under which the average change in scores is sufficient to rank schools in terms of value added. A key...

This note derives simply computed closed-form expressions for the average treatment effect, the effect of treatment on the treated, the local average treatment effect, and the marginal treatment effect in a latent-variable framework for both normal and nonnormal models. Asymptotic standard...

This paper explores issues that arise in the evaluation of social programs using experimental data in the frequently encountered case where some of the experimental treatment group members drop out of the program prior to receiving treatment. We begin with the standard estimator for this case...

This paper considers two problems that arise in determining the role of cognitive ability in explaining the level of and change in the rate of return to schooling. The first problem is that ability and schooling are so strongly dependent that it is not possible, over a wide range of variation in...