Building Bridges Between Structural and Program Evaluation Approaches to Evaluating Policy

By James J. Heckman. 2010

430 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper compares the structural approach to economic policy analysis with the program evaluation approach. It offers a third way to do policy analysis that combines the best features of both approaches. We illustrate the value of this alternative approach by making the implicit economics of LATE explicit, thereby extending the interpretability and range of policy questions that LATE can answer.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

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Citations in the corpus

On the Fairness of Causal Algorithmic Recourse (2020, background): “This idea relates to the economics literature which studies the effect of policy interventions on society, institutions, and individuals (Heckman and Vytlacil 2005; Heckman 2010).”
Blockholders: A Survey of Theory and Evidence (2017, neutral): “For example, as Deaton (2010) and Heckman (2010) argue, even a valid instrument for blockholders would only identify the causal effect of the “compliers” (the subset of blockholders that respond to the instrument) on firm policies, not of blockholders in general. Shoe-leather empirics also highlight”
Identifying the Effect of Changing the Policy Threshold in Regression Discontinuity Models (2015, neutral): “plim ( γ̂ T 0 ) = p (c) = f+ (c)− f− (c) and plim ( γ̂ T 1 ) = p (c) = f ′ + (c)− f ′ − (c) (18)”
Social Experiments in the Labor Market (2016, neutral): “2 For recent criticisms of reliance on RCTs with particular relevance to labor market studies, see Deaton (2010) and Heckman (2010).”
Measuring the Sensitivity of Parameter Estimates to Sample Statistics (2014, background): “" 2 Heckman (2010) writes that " The often complex computational methods that are required to implement [structural estimation] make it less transparent.”
Estimating Marginal Returns to Education (2010, neutral): “Edward Vytlacil Yale University”
Evaluation of biodiversity policy instruments: what works and what doesn't? (2012, background): “However, concerns remain about internal and external validity, scalability, and impacts over the long term and across sub-populations (Pattanayak, 2009; Ravallion, 2009; Deaton, 2010a; Heckman, 2010).”
TRYGVE HAAVELMO AND THE EMERGENCE OF CAUSAL CALCULUS (2014, neutral): “The nonparametric nature of these exercises represents the ultimate realization of what Heckman calls the Marschak’s Maxim (Heckman, 2010), referring to an observation made by Jacob Marschak (1953) that many policy questions do not require the estimation of each and every parameter in the system—a…”
Credit Constraints in Education (2011, neutral): “Heckman, Lochner and Taber (1998) and Gallipoli, Meghir and Violante (2011) show that incorporating general equilibrium effects on skill prices can considerably dampen the impacts of education policies on schooling.”
Comparing and combining process-based crop models and statistical models with some implications for climate change (2017, background): “In recent years,more scholars have begun to see the value inbothapproaches(Chetty2009,TimminsandSchlenker 2009, Heckman 2010).”
Do 'Capitalization Effects' for Public Goods Reveal the Public's Willingness to Pay? (2014, neutral): “As Chetty (2009), Heckman (2010), and Keane (2010) all observe, a structural model is usually needed to provide an economic interpretation of a treatment effect.”
Beyond LATE with a Discrete Instrument (2017, methodology): “Our baseline model uses an estimation procedure that follows closely the approach used in Heckman et al. (2006) and Carneiro et al.”