The recent literature on evaluating manpower training programs demonstrates that alternative nonexperimental estimators of the same program produce a array of estimates of program impact. These findings have led to the call for experiments to be used to perform credible program evaluations....

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...

In contemporary America, racial gaps in achievement are primarily due to gaps in skills. Skill gaps emerge early before children enter school. Families are major producers of those skills. Inequality in performance in school is strongly linked to inequality in family environments. Schools do...

This paper exposits and relates two distinct approaches to bounding the average treatment effect. One approach, based on instrumental variables, is due to Manski (1990, 1994), who derives tight bounds on the average treatment effect under a mean independence form of the instrumental variables...

This paper documents the high level of job security protection in Latin American labor markets and analyzes its impact on employment. We show that job security policies have substantial impact on the level and the distribution of employment in Latin America. They reduce employment and promote...

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 estimates a dynamic model of schooling attainment to investigate the sources of discrepancy by race and ethnicity in college attendance. When the returns to college education rose, college enrollment of whites responded much more quickly than that of minorities. Parental income is a...

The key to estimating the impact of a program is constructing the counterfactual outcome representing what would have happened in its absence. This problem becomes more complicated when agents self-select into the program rather than being exogenously assigned to it. This paper uses data from a...