Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows...

In 2015, the Current Population Survey (CPS) eliminated three questions related to educational attainment. These questions are used by the NBER to calculate the variable, "Imputed Highest Grade Completed" (ihigrdc) in their Monthly Outgoing Rotation Group (MORG) extracts. Imputed Highest Grade...

More than 25 years after German reunification, key economic indicators for households living in eastern German regions are still below the western German levels. This particularly holds for private net wealth, which reaches only about 40% of the western German level. However, a more granular...

The consumer price index (CPI) is a key economic indicator used to gauge inflation, adjust wages, pensions, and social benefits. The producer prices index (PPI) is used for forecasting and deflating GDP estimates. Both indexes are used by the Fund, policymakers, and researchers for global,...

Model-based small area predictors are derived under the assumption that data files are complete. In application to real data, files may contain missing values. We introduce a variant of the bivariate Fay-Herriot model that takes into account for missing values in one component of the target...

The international development community has used the World Bank’s Statistical Capacity Index since its inception in 2004. The Sustainable Development Goals create new challenges for national statistical systems to produce high-quality and internationally comparable data. This paper reviews...