This paper assesses the effect of the U.S. Job Corps (JC), the nation's largest and most comprehensive job training program targeting disadvantaged youths, on wages. We employ partial identification techniques and construct informative nonparametric bounds for the causal effect of interest under...

Government-sponsored education and training programs have the goal to enhance participants' skills so as to become more employable, productive and dependable citizens and thus alleviate poverty and decrease public dependence. While most of the literature evaluating training programs concentrates...

We review and extend nonparametric partial identification results for average and quantile treatment effects in the presence of sample selection. These methods are applied to assessing the wage effects of Job Corps, United States’ largest job-training program targeting disadvantaged youth....

Previous evaluations of Job Corps document disparate effects on the earnings of adolescents (aged 16-19) and young adults (aged 20-24). These are conjectured to be due to differential human capital accumulation within the program between these groups. If correct, the effect of the program on...

We derive nonparametric bounds for local average treatment effects (LATE) without imposing the exclusion restriction assumption or requiring an outcome with bounded support. Instead, we employ assumptions requiring weak monotonicity of mean potential and counterfactual outcomes within or across...

We employ quantile regression fixed effects models to estimate the income-pollution relationship on <italic>NO</italic> _{<italic>x</italic>} (nitrogen oxide) and <italic>SO</italic> ₂ (sulfur dioxide) using U.S. data. Conditional median results suggest that conditional mean methods provide too optimistic estimates about emissions reduction for...</italic>

In many observational studies, the treatment may not be binary or categorical but rather continuous, so the focus is on estimating a continuous dose– response function. In this article, we propose a set of programs that semiparametrically estimate the dose–response function of a continuous...

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesizes that the income-pollution rela- tionship has an inverted U shape: pollution increases with income up to a turning point beyond which it decreases. The empirical literature has concentrated on estimation of this relationship at the mean employing...

Length of exposure to a training program is important in determining the labor market outcomes of participants. Employing methods to estimate the causal effects from continuous treatments, we provide insights regarding the effects of different lengths of enrollment to Job Corps (JC)—...

An important goal in the analysis of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome is to understand the mechanisms through which the treatment causally works. In the economics literature, however, there seems to be no available framework to estimate the relative importance of different causal...