There is wide variation in how consumption is measured in household surveys both across countries and over time. This variation may confound welfare comparisons in part because these alternative survey designs produce consumption estimates that are differentially influenced by contrasting types...

The collection of survey data from war zones or other unstable security situations is vulnerable to error because conflict often limits the implementation options. Although there are elevated risks throughout the process, this paper focuses specifically on challenges to frame construction and...

Macroeconomic risk assessments play an important role in the forecasts of many institutions. A risk forecast is related to the potential asymmetry of the forecast density. In this work, we investigate how the optimality of such risk forecasts can be tested. We find that the Pearson mode skewness...

Multi-step-ahead forecasts of forecast uncertainty in practice are often based on the horizon-specific sample means of recent squared forecast errors, where the number of available past forecast errors decreases one-to-one with the forecast horizon. In this paper, the efficiency gains from the...

National accounts data are always revised. Not only recent data, but also figures dating many years back can be revised substantially. This means that there is a danger that an important part of the central bank's information set is flawed for a long period of time. In this paper we present a...

In this study we use property-level transaction data to construct several different out-of-sample forecasts for the sales of individual homes in 10 counties in Florida. We utilize a number of common forecast combination methods and analyze the properties of their forecast errors. The results...

To estimate causal effects from observational data, an applied researcher must impose beliefs. The instrumental variables exclusion restriction, for example, represents the belief that the instrument has no direct effect on the outcome of interest. Yet beliefs about instrument validity do not...

We propose point forecast accuracy measures based directly on distance of the forecast-error c.d.f. from the unit step function at 0 ("stochastic error distance," or SED). We provide a precise characterization of the relationship between SED and standard predictive loss functions, and we show...