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ERIC Number: ED510023
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2010-May
Pages: 0
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Program Evaluation and Research Designs. NBER Working Paper No. 16016
DiNardo, John; Lee, David S.
National Bureau of Economic Research
This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of "program" in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of Thistlethwaite and Campbell (1960). We organize our discussion of these various research designs by how they secure internal validity: in this view, the RD design can been seen as a close "cousin" of the randomized experiment. An important distinction which emerges from our discussion of "heterogeneous treatment effects" is between ex post (descriptive) and ex ante (predictive) evaluations; these two types of evaluations have distinct, but complementary goals. A second important distinction we make is between statistical statements that are descriptions of our knowledge of the program assignment process and statistical statements that are structural assumptions about individual behavior. Using these distinctions, we examine some commonly employed evaluation strategies, and assess them with a common set of criteria for "internal validity", the foremost goal of an ex post evaluation. In some cases, we also provide some concrete illustrations of how internally valid causal estimates can be supplemented with specific structural assumptions to address "external validity": the estimate from an internally valid "experimental" estimate can be viewed as a "leading term" in an extrapolation for a parameter of interest in an ex ante evaluation.
National Bureau of Economic Research. 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138-5398. Tel: 617-588-0343; Web site: http://www.nber.org
Publication Type: Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: National Bureau of Economic Research
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A