Welcome to the documentation of skillmodels!

Structure of the Documentation

Welcome to skillmodels, a Python implementation of estimators for skill formation models. The econometrics of skill formation models is a very active field and several estimators were proposed. None of them is implemented in standard econometrics packages.

Skillmodels implements the Kalman filter based maximum likelihood estimator proposed by Cunha, Heckman and Schennach (CHS), (Econometrica 2010)

Skillmodels was developed for skill formation models but is by no means limited to this particular application. It can be applied to any dynamic nonlinear latent factor model.

The CHS estimator implemented here differs in two points from the one implemented in their replication files: 1) It uses different normalizations that take into account the critique of Wiswall and Agostinelli. 2) It can optionally use more robust square-root implementations of the Kalman filters.

Most of the code is unit tested. Furthermore, the results have been compared to the Fortran code by CHS for two basic models with hypothetical data from their replication files.

Citation

It took countless hours to write skillmodels. I make it available under a very permissive license in the hope that it helps other people to do great research that advances our knowledge about the formation of cognitive and noncognitive siklls. If you find skillmodels helpful, please don’t forget to cite it. You can find a suggested citation in the README file on GitHub.

Feedback

If you find skillmodels helpful for research or teaching, please let me know. If you encounter any problems with the installation or while using skillmodels, please complain or open an issue at GitHub.