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...