This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs. This research advances the economic policy evaluation literature beyond estimating assorted mean impacts to estimate distributions of outcomes generated by different policies and determine...

This paper formulates and tests the hypothesis that the categories unemployed and out of the labor force are behaviorally distinct labor force states. Our empirical results indicate that they are. In the empirically relevant range the exit rate from unemployment to employment exceeds the exit...

This paper reviews recent evidence on black economic progress. It notes that while relative status increased over the period 1965-1981, absolute differentials in real earnings between blacks and whites widened over this period. The paper goes out to summarize recent studies of the impact of...

Missing from recent discussions of tax reform is any systematic analysis of the effects of various tax proposals on skill formation. This gap in the literature in empirical public finance is due to the absence of any empirically based general equilibrium models with both human capital formation...

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 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 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...

The probability of selection into treatment plays an important role in matching and selection models. However, this probability can often not be consistently estimated, because of choice-based sampling designs with unknown sampling weights. This note establishes that the selection and matching...

This paper investigates four topics. (1) It examines the different roles played by the propensity score (probability of selection) in matching, instrumental variable and control functions methods. (2) It contrasts the roles of exclusion restrictions in matching and selection models. (3) It...