James Heckman

University of Chicago | UC · Department of Economics

Objectives: Delayed child skill development is a common phenomenon in low- and middle-income countries. Effective and low-cost strategies suitable for application to less-developed countries are needed. We summarize empirical findings from recent papers that study a replication of the Jamaica Reach Up and Learn home visiting program in China, Chin...

Orthogonal arrays are a powerful class of experimental designs that has been widely used to determine efficient arrangements of treatment factors in randomized controlled trials. Despite its popularity, the method is seldom used in social sciences. Social experiments must cope with randomization compromises such as noncompliance that often prevent...

We comment on the publication by Zisman and Ganzach (2022). They conduct a replication of one of our earlier papers: Borghans, Golsteyn, Heckman, and Humphries (2016). Replications are valuable and Zisman and Ganzach's (2022) analysis is an interesting and important contribution in its own right. However, their attempt at replication puts emphasis...

This article discusses the econometric model of causal policy analysis and two alternative frameworks that are popular in statistics and computer science. By employing the alternative frameworks uncritically, economists ignore the substantial advantages of an econometric approach, and this results in less informative analyses of economic policy. We...

Background There is little evidence on adult benefits from early childhood interventions in low and middle‐income countries. We assessed adult cognition, psychosocial skills and behaviour from a stimulation trial conducted in Jamaica. Methods Children with stunted growth (height‐for age <−2SD of references) aged 9–24 months were enrolled in a two‐...

This paper estimates returns to education using a dynamic model of educational choice that synthesizes approaches in the structural dynamic discrete choice literature with approaches used in the reduced-form treatment effect literature. It is an empirically robust middle ground between the two approaches that estimates economically interpretable an...

This paper analyzes the nonmarket benefits of education and ability. Using a dynamic model of educational choice, we estimate returns to education that account for selection bias and sorting on gains. We investigate a range of nonmarket outcomes, including incarceration, mental health, voter participation, trust, and participation in welfare. We fi...

This paper defines and analyzes a new monotonicity condition for the identification of counterfactuals and treatment effects in unordered discrete choice models with multiple treatments, heterogeneous agents, and discrete-valued instruments. Unordered monotonicity implies and is implied by additive separability of choice of treatment equations in t...

Significance Grades and scores on achievement tests are widely used as measures of cognition. This paper examines these measures and their constituent parts. We establish that, on average, grades and achievement tests are generally better predictors of life outcomes than “pure” measures of intelligence. The reason is that they capture aspects of pe...

This paper presents evidence on early skill formation and parental investment using an experimentally designed, home visiting program targeting disadvantaged Irish families. Program effects from pregnancy to 18 months are estimated using measures of parenting and child cognitive, noncognitive and physical development. Permutation testing, a stepdow...

This article introduces the EJ Feature on Child Development by reviewing the literature and placing the contributions of the articles in the Feature in the context of a vibrant literature.

This article examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviour of two of the oldest and most widely cited US early childhood interventions evaluated by the method of randomisation with long-term follow-up: the Perry Preschool Project (PPP) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC). There are pronounced gender effects strongly favourin...

A substantial empirical literature documents the rise in wage inequality in the American economy. It is silent on whether the increase in inequality is due to components of earnings that are predictable by agents or whether it is due to greater uncertainty facing them. These two sources of variability have different consequences for both aggregate...

This paper develops robust models for estimating and interpreting treatment effects arising from both ordered and unordered multistage decision problems. Identification is secured through instrumental variables and/or conditional independence (matching) assumptions. We decompose treatment effects into direct effects and continuation values associat...

In response to health shocks, parents make compensatory and reinforcing investments in different dimensions of human capital across children. Using household data on Chinese child twins whose average age is 11, we find that, compared with the twin sibling who did not suffer from negative early health shocks at age 0–3, the other twin sibling who di...

We compare the performance of maximum likelihood (ML) and simulated method of moments (SMM) estimators for dynamic discrete choice models. We construct and estimate a simplified dynamic structural model of education that captures some basic features of educational choices in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s. We use estimates from our...

This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods for shaping different skills. It presents economic mod...

A substantial literature shows that U.S. early childhood interventions have important long-term economic benefits. However, there is little evidence on this question for developing countries. We report substantial effects on the earnings of participants in a randomized intervention conducted in 1986–1987 that gave psychosocial stimulation to growth...

Look After the Child Investing in children has been demonstrated to improve their lives, both during the school-age years and afterward, as assessed by outcomes such as employment and income; furthermore, these investments often help those in the most need. Campbell et al. (p. 1478 ) report that these investments can also lead to improved adult hea...

This paper contributes to the emerging Bayesian literature on treatment effects. It derives treatment parameters in the framework of a potential outcomes model with a treatment choice equation, where the correlation between the unobservable components of the model is driven by a low-dimensional vector of latent factors. The analyst is assumed to ha...

Haavelmo’s seminal 1943 and 1944 papers are the first rigorous treatment of causality. In them, he distinguished the definition of causal parameters from their identification. He showed that causal parameters are defined using hypothetical models that assign variation to some of the inputs determining outcomes while holding all other inputs fixed....

Using the NLSY79 and the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults datasets, this paper formulates, provides conditions for parametric and non-parametric identification and empirically estimates the parameters of an altruistic model of parental preschool investment within a structural dynamic programming framework. It then examines the effect of a publicly...

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward disadvantaged children have substantial impacts on later life outcomes. Little is known about the mechanisms producing these impacts. This paper uses longitudinal data on cognitive and personality traits from an experimental evaluation of the influentia...

This paper presents an econometric mediation analysis. It considers identification of production functions and the sources of output effects (treatment effects) from ex-perimental interventions when some inputs are mismeasured and others are entirely omitted.

Pediatricians should consider the costs and benefits of preventing rather than treating childhood diseases. We present an integrated developmental approach to child and adult health that considers the costs and benefits of interventions over the life cycle. We suggest policies to promote child health which are currently outside the boundaries of co...

To identify molecular mechanisms by which early life social conditions might influence adult risk of disease in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), we analyze changes in basal leukocyte gene expression profiles in 4-mo-old animals reared under adverse social conditions. Compared with the basal condition of maternal rearing (MR), leukocytes from peer-...

This chapter presents an integrated economic approach that organizes and interprets the evidence on child development. It also discusses the indicators of child well-being that are used in international comparisons. Recent evidence on child development is summarized, and policies to promote child well-being are discussed. The chapter concludes with...

This paper summarizes recent evidence on what achievement tests measure; how achievement tests relate to other measures of "cognitive ability" like IQ and grades; the important skills that achievement tests miss or mismeasure, and how much these skills matter in life. Achievement tests miss, or perhaps more accurately, do not adequately capture, so...

The option to obtain a General Education Development (GED) certificate changes the incentives facing high school students. This paper evaluates the effect of three different GED policy innovations on high school graduation rates. A six point decrease in the GED pass rate due to an increase in passing standards produced a 1.3 point decline in overal...

This paper exploits a unique ongoing experiment to analyze the effects of early rearing conditions on physical and mental health in a sample of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). We analyze the health records of 231 monkeys that were randomly allocated at birth across three rearing conditions: mother rearing, peer rearing, and surrogate peer rearing....

China’s rapid growth was fueled by substantial physical capital investments applied to a large stock of medium skilled labor acquired before economic reforms began. As development proceeded, the demand for high skilled labor has grown, and, in the past decade, China has made substantial investments in producing it. The egalitarian access to medium...

No abstract available.

The developmental approach to the study of health promises to produce a deeper understanding of both prevention and remediation strategies. Understanding the dynamic mechanisms of causation is essential for devising wise policies. It is not enough to know that early-life conditions help shape later-life outcomes. We need to trace the effects of ear...

Multinomial choice and other nonlinear models are often used to estimate demand. We show how to nonparametrically identify and estimate the distribution of random coefficients that character-izes the heterogeneity among agents in nonlinear models. We introduce an axiom that we prove prove is sufficient for identification. Our axiom requires that th...

This paper reviews the problems and potential benefits of integrating personality psychology into economics. Economists have much to learn from and contribute to personality psychology.

We sketch a framework for exploring the overlap between, and integration of, personality/temperament/character traits and economics. This integrative framework incorporates the study of the evolution and biology of personality, and an investment model from economics. We offer models of the development of traits and the expression of behavior associ...

Leading economists consider the apparent underperformance of the European economy, testing various explanations against data. Economists disagree on what ails the economies of continental western Europe, which are widely perceived to be underperforming in terms of productivity and other metrics. Is it some deficiency in their economic system—in eco...

I consider nonparametric identification of a nonseparable model with a continuous endogenous variable (treatment), a scalar unobservable and an excluded instrumental variable. If the first-stage relationship between the instrument and the treatment is strictly monotone in unobservables then many kinds of relevant instruments can be used to identify...

In contemporary America, racial gaps in achievement are primarily due to gaps in skills. Skill gaps emerge early before children enter school. Families are major producers of those skills. Inequality in performance in school is strongly linked to inequality in family environments. Schools do little to reduce or enlarge the gaps in skills that are p...

Eating disorders are an important and growing health concern, and bulimia nervosa (BN) ac-counts for the largest fraction of eating disorders. Health consequences of BN are substantial and especially serious given the increasingly compulsive nature of the disorder. However, re-markably little is known about the mechanisms underlying the persistent...

This paper estimates the internal rate of return (IRR) to education for men and women of the Terman sample, a 70-year long prospective cohort study of high-ability individuals. The Terman data is unique in that it not only provides full working-life earnings histories of the participants, but it also includes detailed profiles of each subject, incl...

This paper explores the power of personality traits both as predictors and as causes of academic and economic success, health, and criminal activity. Measured personality is interpreted as a construct derived from an economic model of preferences, constraints, and information. Evidence is reviewed about the "situational specificity" of personality...

Using a sequential model of educational choices, we investigate the effect of educational choices on labor market, health, and social outcomes. Unobserved endowments drive the correlations in unobservables across choice and outcome equations. We proxy these endowments with numerous measurements and account for measurement error in the proxies. For...

I consider identification of nonparametric quantile regressions with endogenous re-gressors and an excluded instrumental variable. This model has an outcome equation that is both nonlinear and nonseparable in a latent variable which may be arbitrar-ily dependent with the regressors. This allows for general unobserved heterogeneity and selection on...