Large literatures have analyzed racial and ethnic disparities in economic outcomes and access to the safety net. For such analyses that rely on survey data, it is crucial that survey accuracy does not vary by race and ethnicity. Otherwise, the observed disparities may be confounded by...

Many studies of historical persistence find that modern outcomes strongly reflect characteristics of the same places in the distant past. However they rely on data that often exhibit extreme spatial trends and autocorrelation, suggesting that their unusually large t-statistics may be due to...

It is increasingly common in empirical research to merge data sets containing different units of observation. When the units are not nested, a crosswalk specifying how the units from one data source are allocated to the units of the other is needed. Unfortunately, most crosswalks are ad hoc, a...

The examination of the causal impact of health insurance coverage on healthcare utilisation is a critical endeavour in both academic research and policy formulation. However, this endeavour faces challenges, notably the endogenous selection into coverage and prevalent misreporting of coverage...