This paper considers the problem of making inferences about the effects of a program on multiple outcomes when the assignment of treatment status is imperfectly randomized. By imperfect randomization we mean that treatment status is reassigned after an initial randomization on the basis of...

This paper discusses and illustrates identification problems in personality psychology. The measures used by psychologists to infer traits are based on behaviors, broadly defined. These behaviors are produced from multiple traits interacting with incentives in situations. In general, measures...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of schooling attainment to investigate the sources of racial and ethnic disparity in college attendance. Parental income in the child's adolescent years is a strong predictor of this disparity. This is widely interpreted to mean that credit constraints facing...

This paper begins the synthesis of two currently unrelated literatures: the human capital approach to health economics and the economics of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. A lifecycle investment framework is the foundation for understanding the origins of human inequality and for...

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 article discusses the econometric model of causal policy analysis and two alternative frameworks that are popular in statistics and computer science. By employing the alternative frameworks uncritically, economists ignore the substantial advantages of an econometric approach, and this...

This article demonstrates the value of microdata for understanding the effect of wages on life cycle fertility dynamics. Conventional estimates of neoclassical economic fertility models obtained from linear aggregate time series regressions are widely criticized for being nonrobust when adjusted...

Policy makers view public sector-sponsored employment and training programs and other active labor market policies as tools for integrating the unemployed and economically disadvantaged into the work force. Few public sector programs have received such intensive scrutiny, and been subjected to...

This chapter develops three topics. (1) Identification of the distributions of treatment effects and the distributions of agent subjective evaluations of treatment effects. Methods for identifying ex ante and ex post distributions are presented and empirical examples are given. (2)...