Volume 23, Number 2 (Spring) 1988
Björklund, Anders. 1988. "What Experiments Are Needed for Manpower Policy?" Journal of Human Resources 23(2):267-277.
Experiments, where prospective participants are randomly assigned into experimental and control groups, are often regarded as the ideal approach to evaluation of manpower policies. This examination shows that such experimental designs can yield misleading and incomplete information about program impacts in cases where program effects vary among individuals. When individual heterogeneity is present, such designs at best provide unbiased estimates of average program effects, not of marginal effects. This paper proposes alternative experimental designs that permit estimation of the marginal as well as average program impacts.
The author is an associate professor of economics at the Institute for Social Research in Stockholm and a research fellow at the Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research. He would like to thank four referees for very detailed and useful reports.
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