The literature on skill formation and human capital development clearly demonstrates that early investment in children is an equitable and efficient policy with large returns in adulthood. Yet little is known about the mechanisms involved in producing these long-term effects. This paper presents...

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have substantial impacts on later life outcomes. Little is known about the mechanisms producing these impacts. This paper uses longitudinal data on cognitive and personality...

This paper reviews the evidence from recent research that addresses the origins of inequality and the evolution of the capabilities that partly determine inequality. Both cognitive and noncognitive capabilities are important in producing a variety of outcomes. An emerging literature relates...

A full understanding of child development draws on knowledge from economics and psychology. Both cognitive and noncognitive capabilities produce a variety of behaviors and outcomes. An emerging literature relates psychological measurements of personality and cognition to economic preference...

This paper develops methods for evaluating marginal policy changes. We characterize how the effects of marginal policy changes depend on the direction of the policy change, and show that marginal policy effects are fundamentally easier to identify and to estimate than conventional treatment...

This paper examines the performance of the JTPA performance system, a widely emulated model for inducing efficiency in government organizations. We present a model of how performance incentives may distort bureaucratic decisions. We define cream skimming within the model. Two major empirical...

We compare propensity-score matching methods with covariate matching estimators. We first discuss the data requirements of propensity-score matching estimators and covariate matching estimators. Then we propose two new matching metrics incorporating the ...