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Title: Four Parameters of Interest in the Evaluation of Social Programs
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Heckman, James J.
Tobias, Justin L.
Vytlacil, Edward
Four Parameters of Interest in the Evaluation of Social Programs
Southern Economic Journal 68,2 (October 2001): 211-223.
Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1061591
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Southern Economic Association
Keyword(s): College Education; Evaluations; Sociability/Socialization/Social Interaction

This paper reviews four treatment parameters that have become commonly used in the program evaluation literature: 1. the average treatment effect, 2. the effect of treatment on the treated, 3. the local average treatment effect, and 4. the marginal treatment effect. The paper derives simply computed closed-form expressions for these treatment parameters in a latent variable framework with Gaussian error terms. These parameters can be estimated using nothing more than output from a standard two-step procedure. It also briefly describes recent work that seeks to go beyond mean effects and estimate the distributions associated with various outcome gains. The techniques presented in the paper are applied to estimate the return to some form of college education for various populations using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.
Bibliography Citation
Heckman, James J., Justin L. Tobias and Edward Vytlacil. "Four Parameters of Interest in the Evaluation of Social Programs." Southern Economic Journal 68,2 (October 2001): 211-223.