NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Accounting for Dropouts in Evaluations of Social Experiments

James Heckman, Jeffrey Smith, Christopher Taber

NBER Technical Working Paper No. 166*
Issued in September 1994
NBER Program(s):   LS

This paper considers the statistical and economic justification for one widely-used method of adjusting data from social experiments to account for dropping-out behavior due to Bloom (1984). We generalize the method to apply to distributions not just means, and present tests of the key identifying assumption in this context. A reanalysis of the National JTPA experiment base vindicates application of Bloom's method in this context.

*Published: Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 80, no. 1 (1998): 1-14.

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