School systems regularly use student assessments for accountability purposes. But, as highlighted by our conceptual model, different configurations of assessment usage generate performance-conducive incentives of different strengths for different stakeholders in different school environments. We...

This paper examines the econometric causal model for policy analysis developed by the seminal ideas of Ragnar Frisch and Trygve Haavelmo. We compare the econometric causal model with two popular causal frameworks: Neyman-Holland causal model and the do-calculus. The Neyman-Holland causal model...

We study the properties of two specification tests that have been applied to a variety of estimators in the context of value-added measures (VAMs) of teacher and school quality: the Hausman test for choosing between random and fixed effects and a test for feedback (sometimes called a...

This paper analyzes the impact of load factor, facility and generator types on the productivity of Korean electric power plants. In order to capture important differences in the effect of load policy on power output, we use a semiparametric smooth coefficient (SPSC) model that allows us to model...

This paper proposes a parametric approach to estimating a dynamic binary response panel data model that allows for endogenous contemporaneous regressors. Such a model is of particular value for settings in which one wants to estimate the effects of an endogenous treatment on a binary outcome. In...

It is standard practice in applied work to rely on linear least squares regression to estimate the effect of a binary variable ("treatment") on some outcome of interest. In this paper I study the interpretation of the regression estimand when treatment effects are in fact heterogeneous.I show...

Using normalized regression equations, we propose an alternative estimator of industrial gender wage gaps which is identified in the sense that it is invariant to the choice of an unobserved non-discriminatory wage structure, and to the choice of the reference groups of any categorical...