Historical Statistics of the United States is the premier source of quantitative evidence on American economic, social, political, demographic, and institutional history. Introduced in 1949 as a time-series supplement to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, it has inspired similar...

Income is an important correlate for numerous phenomena in the social sciences. But manysurveys collect data with just a single question covering all forms of income. This raisesissues of quality, and these are heightened when individuals are asked about the householdtotal rather than own income...

This paper lays out an approach, and a research agenda, for assessing the impact of carbon pricing on household budgets, and of possible compensatory government transfers that can be financed through carbon-tax revenues. It relies on a rich set of available data and policy models and combines...

The UK imports many doctors from abroad, where medical training and experience might be different. This study attempts to understand how drug prescription behaviour differs in English GP practices which have larger or smaller numbers of foreign-trained GPs. Results show that in general practices...

Gender gaps in financial literacy are pervasive and persistent. They are partly explained because women choose "I do not know" more frequently. We test for the effectiveness of three interventions to shift this behavior. The control survey includes the possibility of "I do not know". The three...

This paper analyzes the effects of training quality on the likelihood of treatment completion by estimating dose-response functions via a generalized propensity score. Results show a statistically positive relationship between training quality and treatment completion for youth participants in Peru.

Country statistical capacity is increasingly recognized as crucial for development, but no academic study exists that reviews the available assessment tools. We offer the first review study that fills this gap, paying particular attention to data and practical measurement challenges. We compare...

A country's statistical capacity takes an indispensable part in its development. We offer a comprehensive comparison between the World Bank's Statistical Performance Indicators and Index (SPI) and its predecessor, the Statistical Capacity Index (SCI) regarding different conceptual and empirical...

Monitoring soil quality provides indispensable inputs for effective policy advice, but very few poorer countries can implement high-quality surveys on soil. We offer an alternative, low-cost imputation-based approach to generating various soil quality indicators. The estimation results validate...

This study attempts to explain why the transition to a market economy is skill-biased. It shows unequivocal evidence on increased skill wage premium and supply of skills in transition economies. It examines whether similar skill?favoring shifts in the Russian and U.S. economies are driven by the...