Alternative Approaches to the Evaluation of Public Policy Interventions with an Emphasis on Policies Designed to Foster Human Capital

本研究的目标是开发一种结合结构效应和治疗效应方法的最佳特征的政策评估方法，通过将更多的经济学纳入治疗效应方法，同时为结构性政策评估提供更稳健的统计方法。使用潜在变量建模框架来制定和估计结构模型，并在进行治疗效果的非参数分析时降低估计问题的维数。这项研究代表了研究者之前工作的延伸，目标是产生一个经济上可解释的收益函数，可以用来评估旨在促进人力资本的其他公共政策。收益函数也嵌套在收益、学校教育和资本形成的动态一般均衡模型中。

The goal of this research is to develop an approach to policy evaluation that combines the best features of the structural and treatment effects approach, by putting more economics into the treatment effects approach and at the same time producing a more robust statistical approach to structural policy evaluation. A latent variable modeling framework is used to formulate and estimate structural models and reduce the dimensionality of the estimation problem in conducting nonparametric analyses of treatment effects. The research represents an extension of previous work by the investigators, and the goal is to produce an economically interpretable earnings function that can be used to evaluate alternative public policies designed to foster human capital. The earnings function is also nested within a dynamic general equilibrium model of earnings, schooling, and capital formation.