The focus of this Element is on the idea that choice is hierarchical so that there exists an order of acquisition of durable goods and assets as real incomes increase. Two main approaches to deriving such an order are presented, the so-called Paroush approach and Item Response Theory. An...

In vocational education and training, it can be assumed that the digital transformation increases the relevance of individuals' cross-occupational collaboration competency (COCC) across vocational and professional sectors, thus improving and reorganizing processes across time and domains on the...

In empirical studies, the data usually don't include all the variables of interest in an economic model. This paper shows the identification of unobserved variables in observations at the population level. When the observables are distinct in each observation, there exists a function mapping...

The ability to work with graphs is at the core of the economic domain and is also one of the central challenges for novices in the field. To accurately assess the graph competence of higher education students, we developed and tested an 18-item graph competence instrument with different...

Economic models often depend on quantities that are unobservable, either for privacy reasons or because they are difficult to measure. Examples of such variables include human capital (or ability), personal income, unobserved heterogeneity (such as consumer "types"), etc. This situation has...

Agricultural sustainability (AS) is a key component in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Despite wide use of the concept in both research and policy, there is still not a universally accepted method for its measurement. This research proposes using item response theory (IRT) to generate a...

This paper studies the asymptotic properties of empirical nonparametric regressions that partially misspecify the relationships between nonstationary variables. In particular, we analyze nonparametric kernel regressions in which a potential nonlinear cointegrating regression is misspecified...

Hurdle and zero-inflated models are the two foremost methods used to deal with excess zeros. However, their reliance on the nonparticipation assumption is a drawback when applied to recreation demand analysis because there is not a theoretical framework convincingly explaining presence of...

In this paper we study the process of children's skill formation. The identification of this process is challenging because children's skills are observed only through arbitrarily scaled and imperfect measures. Using a dynamic la- tent factor structure, we provide new identification results...

A recent and growing area of research applies latent factor models to study the development of children's skills. Some normalization is required in these models because the latent variables have no natural units and no known location or scale. We show that the standard practice of...

We develop a new estimator for the process of children's skill formation in which children's skills endogenously develop according to a dynamic latent factor structure. Rather than assuming skills are measured perfectly by a particular measure, we accommodate the variety of skills measures used...

A recent and growing area of research applies latent factor models to study the development of children's skills. Some normalization is required in these models because the latent variables have no natural units and no known location or scale. We show that the standard practice of...

Paul Green, writing with Carmone and Wachpress (1976), was among the first scholars to introduce latent variable models to marketing by utilizing the CANDECOMP procedure (Carroll 1980) on contingency tables. A year later, Green, Carmone, and Wachpress (1977) introduced logit and log-linear...

We study the impact of child work on cognitive development in four Low- and Middle-Income Countries. We advance the literature by using cognitive test scores collected regardless of school attendance. We also address a key gap in the literature by controlling for children's complete time...

We study the impact of child work on cognitive development in four Low- and Middle-Income Countries. We advance the literature by using cognitive test scores collected regardless of school attendance. We also address a key gap in the literature by controlling for children’s complete time...