In this paper we examine how having a child as a teen affects the cognitive development of young women as measured on standardized tests. The research in this paper makes use of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, a biennial survey that contains information on a cohort of young...

The basic idea of program evaluation is both simple and appealing. Program outcomes are measured and compared to some minimum performance standard or threshold. In practice, however, evaluation is quite difficult. Two fundamental problems of outcome measurement must be addressed. The first,...

Under the new welfare system, states must design and institute programs that both provide assistance and encourage work, two objectives that have thus far appeared incompatible. Will states meet these new requirements? For many innovative programs, the randomized welfare-to-work experiments...

Planners often face the especially difficult and important task of assigning programs or treatments to optimize outcomes. Using the recent welfare-to-work reforms as an illustration, this paper considers the normative problem of how administrators might use data from randomized experiments to...

The basic idea of program evaluation is both simple and appealing. Program outcomes are measured and compared to some minimum performance standard or threshold. In practice, however, evaluation is quite difficult. Two fundamental problems of outcome measurement must be addressed. The first,...

Econometric analyses of treatment response commonly use instrumental variable (IV) assumptions to identify treatment effects. Yet the credibility of IV assumptions is often a matter of considerable disagreement, with much debate about whether some covariate is or is not a "valid instrument" in...

Econometric analyses of treatment response often use instrumental variable (IV) assumptions to identify treatment effects. The traditional IV assumption holds that mean response is constant across the sub-populations of persons with different values of an observed covariate. Manski and...