We are delighted to announce that the 2026 Peter H. Rossi Award for Contributions to the Theory or Practice of Program Evaluation has been given to Dr. Peter Z. Schochet. He will be presented the award and will give a talk about his work at the upcoming Annual Meeting of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) on Thursday, November 5th at 1:45 PM.
Peter Schochet has made exceptional contributions to both the theory and practice of program evaluation. His research transformed the statistical foundations of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in applied settings while demonstrating those methods through leadership of many of the nation’s most influential evaluations in education and workforce policy.
Peter’s principal scholarly contribution is his work on design-based causal inference for RCTs. He developed rigorous statistical methods that address practical problems routinely encountered in policy evaluations, including clustered and blocked randomization, multi-armed trials, subgroup estimation, local average treatment effects, and analyses using administrative data. These advances provided a firm theoretical foundation for methods that evaluators had long used without comparable statistical justification. His work has made design-based inference substantially more accessible and germane for applied researchers.
Peter also translated these methodological advances into practice. With support from the Institute of Education Sciences, he helped develop RCT-YES, a free software package that enables researchers and practitioners to implement these methods in randomized and quasi-experimental evaluations. As a result, his work has influenced not only statistical theory but also the everyday practice of evaluation.
Beyond this central contribution, Peter made important advances across a wide range of evaluation methods, including statistical power analysis, regression discontinuity designs, multiple-testing adjustments, value-added modeling, mediation analyses, propensity-score methods, and the estimation of causal effects using program performance measures. His publications have addressed many of the methodological challenges that arise in real-world evaluations, and he chaired the Institute of Education Sciences What Works Clearinghouse methods committee that established evidence standards for regression discontinuity designs.
Peter’s methodological leadership has been matched by an extraordinary record of applied evaluation. He directed or played major leadership roles in more than fifteen large-scale studies spanning workforce development, education, nutrition, apprenticeship, and employment policy. Among the most influential were the National Job Corps Study and its long-term follow-up, the first experimental evaluation of the Workforce Investment Act Adult and Dislocated Worker programs, the congressionally mandated evaluation of SNAP Employment and Training pilots, the evaluation of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, and the Youth CareerConnect evaluation. These studies helped establish the evidence base for major federal programs affecting millions of Americans.
Taken together, Peter’s career exemplifies the purpose of the Peter H. Rossi Award. He has strengthened the scientific foundations of program evaluation, developed practical tools that enable others to conduct more rigorous studies, and produced influential evidence that has informed public policy. Few evaluators have combined methodological innovation and policy-relevant application with such breadth, rigor, and sustained impact.
Peter received his Ph.D. in Economics and M.Phil. in Statistics from Yale University in 1991, and then spent 33 years at Mathematica Inc., where he was a Senior Fellow and Associate Director. In 2016, he was a Visiting Professor at Sciences Po and Crest Ensae in Paris, France and is now a private consultant at SchoStat Consulting. Dr. Schochet has published articles in major policy and statistics journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Journal of the American Statistical Association, and has served as Associate Editor on several journals.
More information about the Rossi award, including past recipients, can be found here.