CHILDREN AND FAMILIES: ECONOMICS

拟议研究的目标是完成在我们之前的拨款下开始的关于通过GED认证完成高中学业的决定因素和后果的工作，并了解中学辍学决定的原因和后果。我们寻求支持，以完成我们目前对数据集的分析，将我们的分析扩展到更多的数据集，并在一个连贯一致的框架内综合和组织所有现有证据。我们已经制定了一些关于GED的暂定假设，我们寻求支持，以使用额外的数据集和对我们当前数据集的不同识别假设，以严格的方式测试它们。我们寻求支持，以检查GED的质量，将其作为学术和社交技能的标志。我们的目标是撰写一本关于高中辍学和获得GED学位的原因和后果的专著。我们还寻求支持，以完成构建严格合理的计量经济模型的任务，以分析生命周期动态，这些模型比目前使用的标准等级转换模型更一般。我们目前正在开发一类丰富的半参数模型，用于分析生命周期或生命过程状态之间的转变，这些模型不依赖于任意的分布假设，可以用来进行严格的反事实政策模拟，以评估诸如GED等青年生命周期中各种干预措施的有效性。我们寻求支持，以扩大用于在各种貌似合理的行为假设下识别政策反事实的工具集，并使用这些工具来分析GED接受度。

The goal of the proposed research is to complete the work begun under our previous grant on the determinants and consequences of high school completion via GED certification and to understand the causes and consequences of secondary school drop out decisions. We seek support to complete our ongoing analysis of the data sets, to extend our analysis to additional data sets, and to synthesize and organize all of the available evidence in a coherence framework. We have developed a number of tentative hypotheses regarding the GED and we seek support to test them in a rigorous fashion using additional data sets and different identifying assumptions on our current data sets. We seek support to examine the quality of the GED as a signal of both scholastic and social skills. Our goal is a monograph on the causes and consequences of dropping out of high school and of GED attainment. We also seek support to complete the task of constructing rigorously justified econometric models for analyzing life cycle dynamics that are more general than the standard grade transition models currently used. We are currently developing a rich class of semiparametric models for analyzing transitions among life cycle or life course states that are not dependent on arbitrary distributional assumptions and that can be used to conduct rigorous counterfactual policy simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of various interventions in the life cycle of youth such as the GED. We seek support to expand the set of tools used to identify policy counterfactuals under a variety of plausible behavioral assumptions and to use these tools to analyze GED recipiency.