A recent literature has developed that combines two prominent empirical approaches to ex ante policy evaluation: randomized controlled trials (RCT) and structural estimation. The RCT provides a "gold-standard'' estimate of a particular treatment, but only of that treatment. Structural estimation...

This paper discusses methods for evaluating the impacts of social programs prior to their implementation. Ex ante evaluation is useful for designing programs that achieve some optimality criteria, such as maximizing impact for a given cost. This paper illustrates the use of behavioral models in...

One of the most striking changes in the U.S. economy over the past 50 years has been the growth in the service sector. Between 1950 and 2000, service-sector employment grew from 57 to 75 percent of total employment. However, over this time, the real hourly wage in the service sector grew only...

In this paper, we structurally estimate a sequential model of high school attendance and work decisions. The estimates imply that youths who drop out of high school have different traits than those who graduate, e.g., they have lower school ability and/or motivation, lower expectations about the...

The development over the past 25 years of methods for the estimation of discrete choice dynamic programming (DCDP) models opened up new frontiers for empirical research in a host of areas, including labor economics, industrial organization, economic demography, health economics, development...