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

这项研究的目的是开发一种结合结构和治疗效果方法的最佳特征的政策评估方法，通过在治疗效果方法中加入更多的经济学，同时产生更稳健的结构政策评估的统计方法。在进行治疗效果的非参数分析时，使用潜变量建模框架来制定和估计结构模型，并降低估计问题的维度。这项研究代表了调查人员之前工作的延伸，目标是产生一个在经济上可以解释的收入函数，可以用来评估旨在培育人力资本的替代公共政策。收入函数也嵌套在收入、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.