We examine whether changes in the local school choice environment affect the amount of information parents collect about local school quality, using data on over 100 million searches from greatschools.org. We link monthly data on search frequency in local “Search Units” to information on...

This paper provides a data-driven overview of the different online platforms that consumers use to search for books and booksellers, and documents how the use of these platforms is shifting over time. Our data suggest that, as a result of digitization, consumers are increasingly conducting...

Beginning in 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed television advertisements to make major statements about a prescription drug, while referring to detailed drug information on the internet (FDA 1997; 2015). The hope was that consumers would seek additional information online to fully...

Between the 2007 and 2012 Economic Censuses (EC), the count of franchise-affiliated establishments declined by 9.8%. One reason for this decline was a reduction in resources that the Census Bureau was able to dedicate to the manual evaluation of survey responses in the franchise section of the...

Survey under-coverage of top incomes leads to bias in survey-based estimates of overall income inequality. Using income tax record data in combination with survey data is a potential approach to address the problem; we consider here the UK's pioneering ‘SPI adjustment' method that implements...

All empirical researchers know that having more sources of variation in a dataset is valuable. What is not known is how valuable, and if the marginal value of adding another source of variation diminishes or increases. This note provides explicit answers to these questions. It defines "valuable"...

Cloud computing—computing done on an off-site network of resources accessed through the Internet—is revolutionizing how computing services are used. However, because cloud is so new and it largely is an intermediate input to other industries, it is difficult to track in the U.S. statistical...

We develop a simple method to reduce privacy loss when disclosing statistics such as OLS regression estimates based on samples with small numbers of observations. We focus on the case where the dataset can be broken into many groups (“cells”) and one is interested in releasing statistics for...

Using a large data set that links individual Current Population Survey (CPS) records to employer-reported administrative data, we document substantial discrepancies in basic measures of employment status that persist even after controlling for known definitional differences between the two data...

Globalisation presents significant statistical challenges, particularly for small and open economies in terms of measuring macroeconomic level and growth indicators and communicating the results in a meaningful way. In the aftermath of the so-called “Irish case”, Eurostat with its partners...