Kenneth I Wolpin
Biographic Data
| ID | 964754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kenneth I Wolpin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kenneth I |
| FAMILY NAME | Wolpin |
| SIGNATURE | WOLPIN K I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 426 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Accounting for Mathematics Performance of High School Students in Mexico
This paper estimates a model of the effort decisions of students and teachers in a classroom setting to understand the performance of Mexican high school students on curriculum-based examinations. The model allows for student heterogeneity in initial mathematics preparation and knowledge preference and for teacher heterogeneity in instructional ability and preferences for student knowledge. Survey data include multiple measurements of student and…
Aligning Learning Incentives of Students and Teachers
This paper evaluates the impact of three different performance incentive schemes using data from a social experiment that randomized 88 Mexican high schools with over 40,000 students into three treatment groups and a control group. Treatment 1 provides individual incentives for performance on curriculum-based mathematics tests to students only, treatment 2 to teachers only, and treatment 3 gives both individual and group incentives to students, t…
The Production of Cognitive Achievement in Children
This paper studies the determinants of children’s scores on tests of cognitive achievement in math and reading. Using rich longitudinal data on test scores, home environments, and schools, we implement alternative specifications for the cognitive achievement production function that allow achievement to depend on the entire history of lagged home and school inputs as well as on parents’ ability and unobserved endowments. We use cross‐validation m…
Assessing the Impact of a School Subsidy Program in Mexico
This paper uses data from a randomized social experiment in Mexico to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental decisions about fertility and child schooling, to evaluate the effects of the PROGRESA school subsidy program, and to perform a variety of counterfactual experiments of policy alternatives. Our method of validation estimates the model without using post-program data and then compares the model’s predictions about prog…
On the Specification and Estimation of the Production Function for Cognitive Achievement
This paper considers methods for modelling the production function for cognitive achievement in a way that captures theoretical notions that child development is a cumulative process depending on the history of family and school inputs and on innate ability. It develops a general modelling framework that accommodates many of the estimating equations used in the literatures. It considers different ways of addressing data limitations, and it makes …
The Effect of Parental Transfers and Borrowing Constraints on Educational Attainment
Natural “Natural Experiments” in Economics
The recent literature exploiting natural events as “natural experiment” instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge. A weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral, market, and technological assumptions made by the authors in justifying their interpretations of the estimates is often absent. The methodology and findings from twenty studies are summarized and simp…
Why Youths Drop out of High School
In this paper, we structurally estimate a sequential model of high school attendance and work decisions. The estimates imply that youths who drop out of high school have different traits than those who graduate, e.g., they have lower school ability and/or motivation, lower expectations about the rewards from graduation, and a comparative advantage at jobs that are done by non-graduates. We also found that working while in school reduces school pe…
Estimating the Effect of Racial Discrimination on First Job Wage Offers
In this paper we develop and implement a method for bounding the extent to which labor market discrimination can account for racial wage differentials. The method is based on a two-sided, search-matching model that formally accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and unobserved offered wages. We find that racial differences in offered wages are proportionately twice (three times) as large as racial differences in accepted wages for high-school drop…
Introduction to the JBES Special Issue on Structural Estimation in Applied Microeconomics
In the introduction to the special issue, we discusses the important role of economic theory in drawing inferences about behavior from data. The papers in the special issue represent several different approaches to theory-based empirical analysis, ranging from full solution methods to the estimation of approximate reduced-form decision rules. We contrast these various approaches to estimation
Introduction to the "JBES" Special Issue on Structural Estimation in Applied Microeconomics
In the introduction to the special issue, we discusses the important role of economic theory in drawing inferences about behavior from data. The papers in the special issue represent several different approaches to theory-based empirical analysis, ranging from "full solution" methods to the estimation of "approximate reduced-form decision rules." We contrast these various approaches to estimation
The Career Decisions of Young Men
This paper provides structural estimates of a dynamic model of schooling, work, and occupational choice decisions based on eleven years of observations on a sample of young men from the 1979 youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLSY). The authors find that a suitably extended human capital investment model can in fact do an excellent job of fitting observed data on school attendance, work, occupational cho…
The Solution and Estimation of Discrete Choice Dynamic Programming Models by Simulation and Interpolation
Over the past decade, a substantial literature on methods for the estimation of discrete choice dynamic programming (DDP) models of behavior has developed. However, the implementation of these methods can impose major computational burdens because solving for agents' decision rules often involves high dimensional integrations that must be performed at each point in the state space. In this paper we develop an approximate solution method that cons…
Credit Market Constraints, Consumption Smoothing, and the Accumulation of Durable Production Assets in Low-Income Countries
This paper formulates and estimates a finite-horizon, structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low-income agricultural environments: income uncertainty, constraints on borrowing and rental markets, and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption. The model is fit to longitudinal Indian household data on farm profits, bullock stocks, and pump sets. The estimated…
The Determinants of Black-White Differences in Early Employment Careers
This paper studies the transition from school to full-time employment and subsequent labor mobility during the first five postschooling years for several recent cohorts of black and white male "terminal" high school graduates using unique data from the 1979 youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience. A constrained optimization model of labor-force dynamics is implemented, empirically integrating features of model…
An Estimable Dynamic Stochastic Model of Fertility and Child Mortality
This paper develops a finite-horizon dynamic stochastic model of discrete choice with respect to life-cycle fertility within an environment where infant survival is uncertain. The model yields implications for the number, timing, and spacing of children. A tractable estimation method is developed for the linear constraint-quadratic utility case that is intimately tied to the dynamic optimization problem, and the method is applied to Malaysian hou…
Governmental interventions and household behavior in a developing country
Testing the Quantity-Quality Fertility Model
The predictive content of the quantity-quality model of fertility and the empirical information required for verification under a minimal set of restrictions on the utility function is described. It is demonstrated that commodity-independent compensated price effects must be known to infer the existence of the unobservable interdependent shadow prices of the model with a relatively weak structure improsed on preference orderings. A method of usin…
A Time Series--Cross Section Analysis of International Variation in Crime and Punishment
T HE purpose of this paper is to ascertain the extent to which deterrence, environment, and culture can be considered responsible for the observed variance in the propensity for criminal behavior across countries. It is based on time-series observations on robberies from 1955 to 1971 for three countries: England, Japan and the United States as represented by California.1 The differential impacts on the per-capita robbery rate of the certainty and…
Life-Cycle Labor Supply and Fertility
Although estimates of the fertility-labor supply relationship abound, a full appreciation of the interpretation of such estimates has been lacking, regardless of the empirical strategy employed. This paper attempts to elucidate, within the context of a life-cycle decision-making process, the information contained in the estimated association between fertility and labor supply as calculated from "single" and "simultaneous-equations" estimation tec…
An Economic Analysis of Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1894-1967
Crime of almost every variety has increased enormously over the past 80 years in England, at the same time that the risk of capture and severity of punishment have declined. This paper presents an attempt to understand these profiles and their interrelationship. Comparisons with the United States are also stressed. In performing this analysis, methodologies were developed and implemented to isolate the deterrent component from the incapacitation …
Evaluating the Labor-Market Effects of Social Programs . Orley Ashenfelter , James Blum
Does the Contract Compliance Program Work? An Analysis of Chicago Data
Examination of the effect of the United States Office of Federal Contract Compliance on upgrading the status of minority workers in the country. Government requirements for a firm's affirmative action policies; Comparison between involuntary quotas and voluntary contracts; Selection criteria for awarding of contracts. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)
Credit Market Constraints, Consumption Smoothing, and the Accumulation of Durable Production Assets in Low-Income Countries
This paper formulates and estimates a finite-horizon, structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low-income agricultural environments: income uncertainty, constraints on borrowing and rental markets, and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption. The model is fit to longitudinal Indian household data on farm profits, bullock stocks, and pump sets. The estimated…
On the Specification and Estimation of the Production Function for Cognitive Achievement
This paper considers methods for modelling the production function for cognitive achievement in a way that captures theoretical notions that child development is a cumulative process depending on the history of family and school inputs and on innate ability. It develops a general modelling framework that accommodates many of the estimating equations used in the literatures. It considers different ways of addressing data limitations, and it makes …
The Career Decisions of Young Men
This paper provides structural estimates of a dynamic model of schooling, work, and occupational choice decisions based on eleven years of observations on a sample of young men from the 1979 youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLSY). The authors find that a suitably extended human capital investment model can in fact do an excellent job of fitting observed data on school attendance, work, occupational cho…
Life-Cycle Labor Supply and Fertility
Although estimates of the fertility-labor supply relationship abound, a full appreciation of the interpretation of such estimates has been lacking, regardless of the empirical strategy employed. This paper attempts to elucidate, within the context of a life-cycle decision-making process, the information contained in the estimated association between fertility and labor supply as calculated from "single" and "simultaneous-equations" estimation tec…
An Estimable Dynamic Stochastic Model of Fertility and Child Mortality
This paper develops a finite-horizon dynamic stochastic model of discrete choice with respect to life-cycle fertility within an environment where infant survival is uncertain. The model yields implications for the number, timing, and spacing of children. A tractable estimation method is developed for the linear constraint-quadratic utility case that is intimately tied to the dynamic optimization problem, and the method is applied to Malaysian hou…
An Economic Analysis of Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1894-1967
Crime of almost every variety has increased enormously over the past 80 years in England, at the same time that the risk of capture and severity of punishment have declined. This paper presents an attempt to understand these profiles and their interrelationship. Comparisons with the United States are also stressed. In performing this analysis, methodologies were developed and implemented to isolate the deterrent component from the incapacitation …
Aligning Learning Incentives of Students and Teachers
This paper evaluates the impact of three different performance incentive schemes using data from a social experiment that randomized 88 Mexican high schools with over 40,000 students into three treatment groups and a control group. Treatment 1 provides individual incentives for performance on curriculum-based mathematics tests to students only, treatment 2 to teachers only, and treatment 3 gives both individual and group incentives to students, t…
Governmental interventions and household behavior in a developing country
Does the Contract Compliance Program Work? An Analysis of Chicago Data
Examination of the effect of the United States Office of Federal Contract Compliance on upgrading the status of minority workers in the country. Government requirements for a firm's affirmative action policies; Comparison between involuntary quotas and voluntary contracts; Selection criteria for awarding of contracts. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)
The Determinants of Black-White Differences in Early Employment Careers
This paper studies the transition from school to full-time employment and subsequent labor mobility during the first five postschooling years for several recent cohorts of black and white male "terminal" high school graduates using unique data from the 1979 youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience. A constrained optimization model of labor-force dynamics is implemented, empirically integrating features of model…
Accounting for Mathematics Performance of High School Students in Mexico
This paper estimates a model of the effort decisions of students and teachers in a classroom setting to understand the performance of Mexican high school students on curriculum-based examinations. The model allows for student heterogeneity in initial mathematics preparation and knowledge preference and for teacher heterogeneity in instructional ability and preferences for student knowledge. Survey data include multiple measurements of student and…
Does the Contract Compliance Program Work? An Analysis of Chicago Data
Examination of the effect of the United States Office of Federal Contract Compliance on upgrading the status of minority workers in the country. Government requirements for a firm's affirmative action policies; Comparison between involuntary quotas and voluntary contracts; Selection criteria for awarding of contracts. (Abstract copyright EBSCO.)
An Economic Analysis of Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1894-1967
Crime of almost every variety has increased enormously over the past 80 years in England, at the same time that the risk of capture and severity of punishment have declined. This paper presents an attempt to understand these profiles and their interrelationship. Comparisons with the United States are also stressed. In performing this analysis, methodologies were developed and implemented to isolate the deterrent component from the incapacitation …
Evaluating the Labor-Market Effects of Social Programs . Orley Ashenfelter , James Blum
Testing the Quantity-Quality Fertility Model
The predictive content of the quantity-quality model of fertility and the empirical information required for verification under a minimal set of restrictions on the utility function is described. It is demonstrated that commodity-independent compensated price effects must be known to infer the existence of the unobservable interdependent shadow prices of the model with a relatively weak structure improsed on preference orderings. A method of usin…
A Time Series--Cross Section Analysis of International Variation in Crime and Punishment
T HE purpose of this paper is to ascertain the extent to which deterrence, environment, and culture can be considered responsible for the observed variance in the propensity for criminal behavior across countries. It is based on time-series observations on robberies from 1955 to 1971 for three countries: England, Japan and the United States as represented by California.1 The differential impacts on the per-capita robbery rate of the certainty and…
Life-Cycle Labor Supply and Fertility
Although estimates of the fertility-labor supply relationship abound, a full appreciation of the interpretation of such estimates has been lacking, regardless of the empirical strategy employed. This paper attempts to elucidate, within the context of a life-cycle decision-making process, the information contained in the estimated association between fertility and labor supply as calculated from "single" and "simultaneous-equations" estimation tec…
Governmental interventions and household behavior in a developing country
An Estimable Dynamic Stochastic Model of Fertility and Child Mortality
This paper develops a finite-horizon dynamic stochastic model of discrete choice with respect to life-cycle fertility within an environment where infant survival is uncertain. The model yields implications for the number, timing, and spacing of children. A tractable estimation method is developed for the linear constraint-quadratic utility case that is intimately tied to the dynamic optimization problem, and the method is applied to Malaysian hou…
The Determinants of Black-White Differences in Early Employment Careers
This paper studies the transition from school to full-time employment and subsequent labor mobility during the first five postschooling years for several recent cohorts of black and white male "terminal" high school graduates using unique data from the 1979 youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience. A constrained optimization model of labor-force dynamics is implemented, empirically integrating features of model…
Credit Market Constraints, Consumption Smoothing, and the Accumulation of Durable Production Assets in Low-Income Countries
This paper formulates and estimates a finite-horizon, structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low-income agricultural environments: income uncertainty, constraints on borrowing and rental markets, and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption. The model is fit to longitudinal Indian household data on farm profits, bullock stocks, and pump sets. The estimated…
The Solution and Estimation of Discrete Choice Dynamic Programming Models by Simulation and Interpolation
Over the past decade, a substantial literature on methods for the estimation of discrete choice dynamic programming (DDP) models of behavior has developed. However, the implementation of these methods can impose major computational burdens because solving for agents' decision rules often involves high dimensional integrations that must be performed at each point in the state space. In this paper we develop an approximate solution method that cons…
Introduction to the JBES Special Issue on Structural Estimation in Applied Microeconomics
In the introduction to the special issue, we discusses the important role of economic theory in drawing inferences about behavior from data. The papers in the special issue represent several different approaches to theory-based empirical analysis, ranging from full solution methods to the estimation of approximate reduced-form decision rules. We contrast these various approaches to estimation
Introduction to the "JBES" Special Issue on Structural Estimation in Applied Microeconomics
In the introduction to the special issue, we discusses the important role of economic theory in drawing inferences about behavior from data. The papers in the special issue represent several different approaches to theory-based empirical analysis, ranging from "full solution" methods to the estimation of "approximate reduced-form decision rules." We contrast these various approaches to estimation
The Career Decisions of Young Men
This paper provides structural estimates of a dynamic model of schooling, work, and occupational choice decisions based on eleven years of observations on a sample of young men from the 1979 youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience (NLSY). The authors find that a suitably extended human capital investment model can in fact do an excellent job of fitting observed data on school attendance, work, occupational cho…
Why Youths Drop out of High School
In this paper, we structurally estimate a sequential model of high school attendance and work decisions. The estimates imply that youths who drop out of high school have different traits than those who graduate, e.g., they have lower school ability and/or motivation, lower expectations about the rewards from graduation, and a comparative advantage at jobs that are done by non-graduates. We also found that working while in school reduces school pe…
Estimating the Effect of Racial Discrimination on First Job Wage Offers
In this paper we develop and implement a method for bounding the extent to which labor market discrimination can account for racial wage differentials. The method is based on a two-sided, search-matching model that formally accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and unobserved offered wages. We find that racial differences in offered wages are proportionately twice (three times) as large as racial differences in accepted wages for high-school drop…
Natural “Natural Experiments” in Economics
The recent literature exploiting natural events as “natural experiment” instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge. A weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral, market, and technological assumptions made by the authors in justifying their interpretations of the estimates is often absent. The methodology and findings from twenty studies are summarized and simp…
The Effect of Parental Transfers and Borrowing Constraints on Educational Attainment
On the Specification and Estimation of the Production Function for Cognitive Achievement
This paper considers methods for modelling the production function for cognitive achievement in a way that captures theoretical notions that child development is a cumulative process depending on the history of family and school inputs and on innate ability. It develops a general modelling framework that accommodates many of the estimating equations used in the literatures. It considers different ways of addressing data limitations, and it makes …
Assessing the Impact of a School Subsidy Program in Mexico
This paper uses data from a randomized social experiment in Mexico to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental decisions about fertility and child schooling, to evaluate the effects of the PROGRESA school subsidy program, and to perform a variety of counterfactual experiments of policy alternatives. Our method of validation estimates the model without using post-program data and then compares the model’s predictions about prog…
The Production of Cognitive Achievement in Children
This paper studies the determinants of children’s scores on tests of cognitive achievement in math and reading. Using rich longitudinal data on test scores, home environments, and schools, we implement alternative specifications for the cognitive achievement production function that allow achievement to depend on the entire history of lagged home and school inputs as well as on parents’ ability and unobserved endowments. We use cross‐validation m…
Aligning Learning Incentives of Students and Teachers
This paper evaluates the impact of three different performance incentive schemes using data from a social experiment that randomized 88 Mexican high schools with over 40,000 students into three treatment groups and a control group. Treatment 1 provides individual incentives for performance on curriculum-based mathematics tests to students only, treatment 2 to teachers only, and treatment 3 gives both individual and group incentives to students, t…
Accounting for Mathematics Performance of High School Students in Mexico
This paper estimates a model of the effort decisions of students and teachers in a classroom setting to understand the performance of Mexican high school students on curriculum-based examinations. The model allows for student heterogeneity in initial mathematics preparation and knowledge preference and for teacher heterogeneity in instructional ability and preferences for student knowledge. Survey data include multiple measurements of student and…
Economics (21 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Econometrics (12 works) · Mathematics (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Estimation (7 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (7 works) · Statistics (7 works) · Demographic economics (6 works) · Microeconomics (6 works)