Industries in which private nonprofit production is present and significant, such as health care and education, account for more than one-fifth of US economic activity. This paper argues that previous analysis of nonprofits has not separated profit-deviating preferences from the state-defined...

A central problem in applied empirical work is to separate out the patterns in the data that are due to poor production of the data, such as e.g. non-response and measurement errors, from the patterns attributable to the economic phenomena studied. This paper interprets this inference problem as...