Building Bridges Between Structural and Program Evaluation Approaches to Evaluating Policy推荐.pdf

Journal of Economic Literature 48 (June 2010): 2, 356–398 http:/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jel.48.2.356 Building Bridges Between Structural  and Program Evaluation Approaches  to Evaluating Policy James J. Heckman* This paper compares the structural approach to economic policy analysis with the pro­ gram evaluation approach. It offers a third way to do policy analysis that combines the best features of both approaches. I illustrate the value of this alternative approach by making the implicit economics of LATE explicit, thereby extending the interpretability and range of policy questions that LATE can answer. (JEL C21, E61) 1.  Introduction conflicts  between  “structural”  and  “reduced  form” approaches.2 In current usage, “struc- Few  topics  in  economics  evoke  more  tural” is taken to mean parametric, explicitly   passion  than  discussions  about  the  cor- formulated, empirical economic models. 1 rect  way  to  do  empirical  policy  analysis.   “Reduced  form”  has  multiple  and  some- These  discussions  are  sometimes  framed  as  times conflicting meanings. One strand of the  1  See  the  essays  in  the  symposium  “Con  out  of  *  University  of  Chicago,  University  College  Dublin,  Economics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives , Vol. 24, No.  Cowles  Foundation,  Yale  University,  and  the  American  2, Spring 2010 (Joshua D. Angrist and Jorn-Steffen Pischke  Bar Foundation. I thank Ed Vytlacil for numerous discus-