This paper exposits and relates two distinct approaches to bounding the average treatment effect. One approach, based on instrumental variables, is due to Manski (1990, 1994), who derives tight bounds on the average treatment effect under a mean independence form of the instrumental variables...

This paper unites the treatment effect literature and the latent variable literature. The economic questions answered by the commonly used treatment effect parameters are considered. We demonstrate how the marginal treatment effect parameter can be used in a latent variable framework to generate...

This paper formulates an econometric framework for studying the impact of interventions on discrete outcomes when responses to treatment vary among observationally identical persons. Using a latent variable model that can be linked to well-posed economic models, we show how to define and...

This paper uses the marginal treatment effect (MTE) to unify the nonparametric literature on treatment effects with the econometric literature on structural estimation using a nonparametric analog of a policy invariant parameter; to generate a variety of treatment effects from a common...

This paper considers the evaluation of the average treatment effect of a binary endogenous regressor on a binary outcome when one imposes a threshold crossing model on both the endogenous regressor and the outcome variable but without imposing parametric functional form or distributional...

This paper considers the use of instrumental variables to estimate the mean effect of treatment on the treated. It reviews previous work on this topic by Heckman and Robb (1985, 1986) and demonstrates that (a) unless the effect of treatment is the same for everyone (conditional on observables),...

This paper discusses how randomized social experiments operate as an instrumental variable. For two types of randomization schemes, the fundamental experimental estimation equations are derived from the principle that experiments equate bias in control and experimental samples. Using...

This paper considers the recent case for randomized social experimentation and contrasts it with older cases for social experimentation. The recent case eschews behavioral models, assumes that certain mean differences in outcomes are the parameters of interest to evaluators and assumes that...

This paper considers the statistical and economic justification for one widely-used method of adjusting data from social experiments to account for dropping-out behavior due to Bloom (1984). We generalize the method to apply to distributions not just means, and present tests of the key...

This paper demonstrates that even under ideal conditions, social experiments in general only uniquely determine the mean impacts of programs but not the median or the distribution of program impacts. The conventional common parameter evaluation model widely used in econometrics is one case where...