While research has highlighted the benefits of variability in leader behavior to help deal with different demands, erratic variability in behavior might be problematic. Preliminary research suggests that when leader behavior seems to vary unpredictably, followers can perceive it as inconsistent,...

Improper quality adjustment has long been identified as a source of potential measurement bias in consumer price indices (CPIs). However, as no benchmark for quality adjustment exists, it has always been difficult to estimate a potential bias. For this paper, we develop a corridor in which...

The private sector offers reliable labor market data that policymakers, investors, and the public can use to guide their decisions. Revelio Labs provides monthly labor stats from billions of work records, tracking employment, openings, turnover, and pay. Alternative data is created beyond the...

Can questions about life satisfaction be used to measure parental preferences for daughters versus sons? Daughter preference has rarely been documented in the literature, even in matrilineal settings. One possible reason is that the commonly used measures of parental gender preference, such as...

Time poverty is a key yet conceptually contested dimension of household living standards. Both univariate and bivariate measures remain debated because there is no clear consensus on how to define and quantify socially necessary unpaid work, the time that money cannot substitute for, across...

Using information from the ECB's Bank Lending Survey, we examine how the implementation of borrower-based macroprudential measures (BBMs) between 2009-Q1 and 2023-Q3 affected mortgage lending standards in a sample of 15 euro area countries. We find that banks generally tightened credit standards...

Understanding poverty and well-being requires moving beyond income-based measures to account for how work and time are organized within households. While income and unpaid work sustain household living standards, in combination with leisure they determine how these standards are produced and...

In this paper, we present the empirical methodology used to estimate the Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty (LIMTIP) for the United States over the period 2007-2022. We provide a step-by-step account of the statistical matching procedure employed to construct a synthetic dataset...

This paper examines the impact of energy poverty on subjective well-being in Germany using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) over the period 2010-2023. Exploiting within-individual variation, we estimate fixed-effects models using objective, subjective, and composite...

Recent work in economics has developed survey-based measures of economic preferences that are "experimentally" or "behaviorally validated." We scrutinize this approach focusing on the Global Preference Survey (Falk et al., 2018, 2023). Replicating their behavioral validation on almost 2,000...

Empirical evidence suggests that social acceptance of redistribution depends on whether income differences result from preferences (of which individuals are responsible) or from circumstances. We propose a new empirical method that measures the importance of preferences in the distribution of...

Empirical researchers often replace latent constructs with composite indices, treating this as a neutral data-processing step. We prove this is a consequential identification choice. Our (near) impossibility theorem demonstrates that no linear index can guarantee consistent estimates of all...

This paper investigates child poverty in Germany through a multidimensional lens, combining Sen’s Capability Approach and Bourdieu’s Capital Theory to develop a adapted Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for children above 11 and youth aged 17. Drawing on data from the German...

The literature on intergenerational mobility for many countries in the world focus on household surveys that capture the education of parents and their children. While they pay particular attention to issues regarding co-residency of fathers and son, they are somewhat weaker in information on...

This paper develops a novel measure of state fragility: the probability of state failure. We define state failure as the inability to perform core functions and operationalize it through observable breakdowns- conflict, territorial control, institutional deficiency, and public service...

This paper introduces the FinOpen index, a novel measure of capital flow management for 193 countries from 1996 to 2022. Using information from the IMF’s Annual Report on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Restrictions (AREAER), the index is constructed by estimating the level of openness...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been used as a proxy for human progress, despite growing recognition of its limitations. Recently, numerous "beyond GDP" initiatives have emerged, promoting multidimensional dashboards to assess quality of life. However, these often lack a clear headline...

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been used as a proxy for human progress, despite growing recognition of its limitations. Recently, numerous "beyond GDP" initiatives have emerged, promoting multidimensional dashboards to assess quality of life. However, these often lack a clear headline...

The availability of geocoordinates offers valuable insights into spatial patterns of economic, demographic and health outcomes. However, disclosing the exact geolocation of statistical units to secondary analysts contravenes the responsible use of data. To protect privacy, anonymisation methods...

We study how federal information-collection requirements affect public infrastructure spending of local governments. Exploiting the introduction and revision of the federal survey on highway infrastructure, we find that county roads that are randomly sampled by the survey attract more local...

Economic research on time use has traditionally focused on the total time individuals spend across different activities. However, less is known about time-use agency, or the ability to make strategic choices on allocating one’s time. This paper presents the findings from a novel,...

Prior studies assessing welfare across countries have utilised measures that combine country-level outcomes in income and life expectancy. However, this perspective remains blind to the fact that two countries may have the same life expectancy and/or average income but very different underlying...

Digital transformation is a key driver of economic and social progress, and assessing its evolution is essential for guiding public policies. In the European Union (EU), until 2022 the European Commission published the quantitative values of the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI); however,...

In recent decades, the international community has recognized the need to measure poverty more comprehensively, by incorporating various dimensions of well-being. More than half of Latin American countries have developed official multidimensional poverty indices, which are essential for...

This paper investigates poverty dynamics in Brazil, highlighting how the frequency and patterns of movements into and out of poverty shape our understanding of stratification, social mobility, and the design of public policies. Using PNADC microdata from 2015 to 2020, we develop and implement an...

This paper examines the evolution of the biological standard of living using anthropometric data from approximately 22,000 Swiss mercenaries born between c. 1725 and c. 1865. Analyzing mercenary data presents two key challenges: left-truncation due to height requirements and potential selection...

Der Bundeshaushalt muss Zukunftsinvestitionen stärker priorisieren. Darüber besteht in der Theorie ein weit reichender Konsens. In der haushaltspolitischen Praxis ist es hingegen schwierig, dieses Ziel durchzusetzen. Ausgaben mit einem unmittelbaren Gegenwartsnutzen erfahren regelmäßig hohen...

In German surveys, educational attainment is typically assessed through two questionnaire items: the highest general school-leaving qualification and the highest vocational qualification or higher education degree. These items are often combined into one variable for analysis, but there is no...

This paper validates a new set of behavioral measures for socioemotional skills across three Sub-Saharan African countries-Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, and Tanzania-and compares them to widely used self-reported measures. The behavioral measures demonstrate strong psychometric properties and are...

There is a growing need to provide AI risk management models that can assess whether AI applications are safe and trustworthy, to make them responsible. To date, there are a few research papers on this topic. To fill the gap, in this paper we extend the recently proposed SAFE framework, a...

Central bank surveys frequently elicit households’ probabilistic beliefs about future inflation by employing response scales centered around zero inflation. Analyzing data from the high-inflation period of 2022/2023, we demonstrate how this practice leads to distortions in households'...