This paper compares the economic questions addressed by instrumental variables estimators with those addressed by structural approaches. We discuss Marschak's Maxim: estimators should be selected on the basis of their ability to answer well-posed economic problems with minimal assumptions. A key...

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baselinepretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

This paper develops methods for evaluating marginal policy changes. We characterize how the effects of marginal policy changes depend on the direction of the policy change, and show that marginal policy effects are fundamentally easier to identify and to estimate than conventional treatment...

Economic models for hedonic markets characterize the pricing of bundles of attributes and the demand and supply of these attributes under different assumptions about market structure, preferences and technology. (See Jan Tinbergen, 1956, Sherwin Rosen, 1974 and Dennis Epple, 1987, for...

This chapter studies the microeconometric treatment-effect and structural approaches to dynamic policy evaluation. First, we discuss a reduced-form approach based on a sequential randomization or dynamic matching assumption that is popular in biostatistics. We then discuss two complementary...

This paper considers the identification and estimation of hedonic models. We establish that technology and preferences in a separable version of the hedonic model are generically identified up to affine transformations from data on demand and supply in a single hedonic market. For a very general...