Rodrigo Pinto - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Rodrigo Pinto

Econometrica : journal of the Econometric Society, 2018

This paper defines and analyzes a new monotonicity condition for the identification of counterfac... more 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, heterogenous agents and discrete-valued instruments.implies and is implied by additive separability of choice of treatment equations in terms of observed and unobserved variables. These results follow from properties of binary matrices developed in this paper. We investigate conditions under which unordered monotonicity arises as a consequence of choice behavior. We characterize IV estimators of counterfactuals as solutions to discrete mixture problems.

Brazilian Review of Econometrics

Barros's contribution to the literature of policy evaluation stems from advances in statistical m... more Barros's contribution to the literature of policy evaluation stems from advances in statistical methods applied to rigorous empirical analysis. Another central question of Barros's research is the analysis of efficient policies for reducing economic inequality. By pursuing this question, Barros's line of work has recently shifted towards the study of early childhood investment as a tool for promoting economic growth and improving the odds of children born in disadvantaged families (Barros and Olinto, 2008, Barros et al., 2011). We follow Barros's steps by developing a formal statistical evaluation of the Perry preschool program, the oldest and most cited early childhood experiment in the U.S. The evaluation of the Perry program poses three statistical challenges. First, the small sample size casts doubts on standard inference methods that are based on asymptotic assumptions. Second, compromised randomization calls into question the validity of the simple statistical procedures often applied to social experiments. Third, the large number of outcome variables gives rise to the danger of selectively reporting significant estimates. We develop a statistical method that accounts for all these problems and that is tailored to the problems we face in the Perry intervention. We focus on their long-term impact on health and addictive behavior variables. We use new data through age 40, which had never been analyzed before. We find that treated females have fewer negative effects of drug/alcohol use on a range of later-life activities. For males, we find that treated participants use fewer hard drugs, such as heroin and hashish.

We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments which greatly improved this d... more We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments which greatly improved this draft of the paper. We have benefited from comments received on early drafts of this paper at two brown bag lunches at the Statistics Department, University of Chicago, hosted by Stephen Stigler. We thank all of the workshop participants. In addition, we thank

This paper evaluates a randomized controlled trial of the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) program ... more This paper evaluates a randomized controlled trial of the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) program conducted in Memphis, TN in 1990. NFP offers home visits conducted by nurses for disadvantaged first-time mothers during pregnancy and early childhood. We test NFP treatment effects using permutation-based inference that accounts for the NFP randomization protocol. Our methodology is valid for small samples and corrects for multiple-hypothesis testing. We also analyze the underlying mechanisms generating these treatment effects. We decompose NFP treatment effects into components associated with the intervention-enhanced parenting and early childhood skills. The NFP improves home investments, parenting attitudes and mental health for mothers of infants at age 2. At age 6, the NFP boosts cognitive skills for both genders and socioemotional skills for females. These treatment effects are explained by program-induced improvements in maternal traits and early-life family investments. At age 12, the treatment effects for males (but not for females) persist in the form of enhanced achievement test scores. Treatment effects are largely explained by enhanced cognitive skills at age 6. Our evidence of pronounced gender differences in response to early childhood interventions contributes to a growing literature on this topic.

Economic journal (London, England), 2016

This paper examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviors of two of the oldest an... more This paper examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviors of two of the oldest and most widely cited U.S. early childhood interventions evaluated by the method of randomization with long-term follow-up: the Perry Preschool Project (PPP) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC). There are pronounced gender effects strongly favoring boys, although there are also effects for girls. Dynamic mediation analyses show a significant role played by improved childhood traits, above and beyond the effects of experimentally enhanced adult socioeconomic status. These results show the potential of early life interventions for promoting health.

The Effects of Two Influential Early Childhood Interventions on Health and Healthy Behaviors * Th... more The Effects of Two Influential Early Childhood Interventions on Health and Healthy Behaviors * This paper examines the long-term impacts on health and healthy behaviors of two of the oldest and most widely cited U.S. early childhood interventions evaluated by the method of randomization with long-term follow-up: the Perry Preschool Project (PPP) and the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC). There are pronounced gender effects strongly favoring boys, although there are also effects for girls. Dynamic mediation analyses show a significant role played by improved childhood traits, above and beyond the effects of experimentally enhanced adult socioeconomic status. These results show the potential of early life interventions for promoting health.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encoura... more The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

This paper summarizes our recent work on the rate of return and cost-benefit ratio of an influent... more This paper summarizes our recent work on the rate of return and cost-benefit ratio of an influential early childhood program.

Inference with Imperfect Randomization: The Case of the Perry Preschool Program * This paper cons... more Inference with Imperfect Randomization: The Case of the Perry Preschool Program * This paper considers the problem of making inferences about the effects of a program on multiple outcomes when the assignment of treatment status is imperfectly randomized. By imperfect randomization we mean that treatment status is reassigned after an initial randomization on the basis of characteristics that may be observed or unobserved by the analyst. We develop a partial identification approach to this problem that makes use of information limiting the extent to which randomization is imperfect to show that it is still possible to make nontrivial inferences about the effects of the program in such settings. We consider a family of null hypotheses in which each null hypothesis specifies that the program has no effect on one of several outcomes of interest. Under weak assumptions, we construct a procedure for testing this family of null hypotheses in a way that controls the familywise error rate-the probability of even one false rejection-infinite samples. We develop our methodology in the context of a reanalysis of the HighScope Perry Preschool program. We find statistically significant effects of the program on a number of different outcomes of interest, including outcomes related to criminal activity for males and females, even after accounting for the imperfectness of the randomization and the multiplicity of null hypotheses.

Haavelmo's seminal 1943 paper is the ˝first rigorous treatment of causality. In it, he distinguis... more Haavelmo's seminal 1943 paper is the ˝first rigorous treatment of causality. In it, 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. He thus formalized and made operational Marshall's (1890) ceteris paribus analysis. We embed Haavelmo's framework into the recursive framework of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) used in one influential recent approach to causality (Pearl, 2000) and in the related literature on Bayesian nets (Lauritzen, 1996). We compare an approach based on Haavelmo's methodology with a standard approach in the causal literature of DAGs-the "do-calculus" of Pearl (2009). We discuss the limitations of DAGs and in particular of the do-calculus of Pearl in securing identification of economic models. We extend our framework to consider models for simultaneous causality, a central contribution of Haavelmo (1944). In general cases, DAGs cannot be used to analyze models for simultaneous causality, but Haavelmo's approach naturally generalizes to cover it.

American Economic Review, 2013

A growing literature establishes that high quality early childhood interventions targeted toward ... more 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 skills from an experimental evaluation of the influential Perry Preschool program to analyze the channels through which the program boosted both male and female participant outcomes. Experimentally induced changes in personality skills explain a sizable portion of adult treatment effects. (JEL I21, I24, I28, J13, J24)

Science, 2014

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Journal of Public Economics, 2010

This paper estimates the rate of return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program, an early inter... more This paper estimates the rate of return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program, an early intervention program targeted toward disadvantaged African-American youth. Estimates of the rate of return to the Perry program are widely cited to support the claim of substantial economic benefits from preschool education programs. Previous studies of the rate of return to this program ignore the compromises that occurred in the randomization protocol. They do not report standard errors. The rates of return estimated in this paper account for these factors. We conduct an extensive analysis of sensitivity to alternative plausible assumptions. Estimated social rates of return generally fall between 7-10 percent, with most estimates substantially lower than those previously reported in the literature. However, returns are generally statistically significantly different from zero for both males and females and are above the historical return on equity. Estimated benefit-to-cost ratios support this conclusion.

Emerging Markets Review, 2003

In this paper we study the interaction between macroeconomic environment and firms' balance sheet... more In this paper we study the interaction between macroeconomic environment and firms' balance sheet effects in Brazil during the 1990's. We start by assessing the influence of macroeconomic conditions on firms' debt composition in Brazil. We found that larger firms tend to change debt currency composition more in response to a change in the exchange rate risk than small firms. We then proceed to investigate if and how exchange rate balance sheet effects affected the firms' investment decisions. We test directly the exchange rate balance sheet effect on investment. Contrary to earlier findings (Bleakley and Cowan, 2002), we found that firms more indebted in foreign currency tend to invest less when there is an exchange rate devaluation. We tried different controls for the competitiveness effect. First, we control directly for the effect of the exchange rate on exports and imported inputs. We then pursue an alternative investigation strategy, inspired by the credit channel literature. According to this perspective, Tobin's q can provide an adequate control for the competitiveness effect on investment. Our results provide supporting evidence for imperfect capital markets, and for a negative exchange rate balance sheet effect in Brazil. The results concerning the exchange rate balance sheet effect on investment are statistically significant and robust across the different specifications. We tested the results across different periods, classified according to the macroeconomic environment. Our findings suggest that the negative exchange rate balance sheet effect we found in the whole sample is due to the floating exchange rate period. We also found that exchange rate devaluations have important negative impact on both cash flows and sales of indebted firms. Furthermore, the impact of exchange rate variations is asymmetric, and the significant effect detected when no asymmetry is imposed is engendered by exchange rate devaluations. JEL CODE: E22, F31 KEYWORDS: BRAZIL, INVESTMENT, EXCHANGE RATE, BALANCE SHEET EFFECTS, CREDIT CONSTRAINTS. o A revision in the data set allowed us to obtain results that were different from those in Bonomo, Martins, and Pinto (2003). We thank Arturo Galindo, Campbell Harvey, Ugo Panizza, Fabio Schiantarelli for useful suggestions. We also received valuable comments from Heitor Almeida,

Building Bridges between Economics and Personality Psychology

Note: This figure plots the probability of a given behavior associated with moving up in one abil... more Note: This figure plots the probability of a given behavior associated with moving up in one ability distribution for someone after integrating out the other distribution. For example, the lines with markers show the effect of increasing noncognitive ability after integrating the ...

This article explores the impact of human abilities in explaining a variety of economic and behav... more This article explores the impact of human abilities in explaining a variety of economic and behavioral outcomes focusing Risk Behavior. We develop a model where human abilities are decomposed into three main skills: cognitive, noncognitive and health. We improve on the methodology developed by Hansen et al. (2004), Carneiro et al. (2003), and Heckman et al. (2006), by allowing skill interaction, which then rationalizes data on many outcomes of human life. We focus on the interaction of the estimated latent skills and risk behavior. We found that cognitive, noncognitive skills have a major impact on schooling choices. We estimate the skills conditional on four schooling categories: college education, high school graduation, GED, and dropouts. We found the higher schooling level, the higher cognitive skills, as expected. One interesting result is that the noncognitive ability does not follow the same pattern. In our estimations, the GED recipients are the ones with the lowest levels of noncognitive ability. This result corroborates the analysis of Heckman et al. (2006), which state that the GEDs have lower cognitive ability compared to their average cognitive ability. We also show that schooling, driven by cognitive and noncognitive skills, plays an important role in determining risky behaviors. As schooling levels increase, the probability of becoming a gang member or having an irresponsible sexual behavior decreases. In special, the age of the first intercourse increases with the schooling level. The decomposition of the effect of the skills into each outcome shows often that noncognitive ability plays a major part on determining the levels of many outcomes, in special, the risky behavior ones.

NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerre... more NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Social experiments are powerful sources of information about the effectiveness of interventions. ... more Social experiments are powerful sources of information about the effectiveness of interventions. In practice, initial randomization plans are almost always compromised. Multiple hypotheses are frequently tested. "Significant" effects are often reported with p-values that do not account for preliminary screening from a large candidate pool of possible effects. This paper develops tools for analyzing data from experiments as they are actually implemented. We apply these tools to analyze the influential HighScope Perry Preschool Program. The Perry program was a social experiment that provided preschool education and home visits to disadvantaged children during their preschool years. It was evaluated by the method of random assignment. Both treatments and controls have been followed from age 3 through age 40. Previous analyses of the Perry data assume that the planned randomization protocol was implemented. In fact, as in many social experiments, the intended randomization protocol was compromised. Accounting for compromised randomization, multiple-hypothesis testing, and small sample sizes, we find statistically significant and economically important program effects for both males and females. We also examine the representativeness of the Perry study.

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