How theory- and evidence-based are political and economic decisions before the backdrop of disruptive technologies and global crises? The contributions collected here examine this question for the areas of health policy, tax policy, antitrust law, commercial law, and corporate accounting before...

GDP is a closely watched indicator of the current health of the economy and an important tool of economic policy. It has been called one of the great inventions of the 20th century. It is not, however, a persuasive indicator of individual well-being or economic progress. There have been calls to...

Statistically significant results are more rewarded than insignificant ones, so researchers have the incentive to pursue statistical significance. Such p-hacking reduces the informativeness of hypothesis tests by making significant results much more common than they are supposed to be in the...

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented policy responses and a large literature evaluating their impacts. This paper re-examines this literature and investigates the role of researchers' degrees-of-flexibility on the estimated effects of mobility-reducing policies on social-distancing...

Im Koalitionsvertrag der Bundesregierung ist festgehalten, dass die Details der Schuldenbremse und vor allem die Regeln zur Bestimmung des Produktionspotenzials überprüft werden sollen. Insbesondere die Methodik zur Berechnung der konjunkturellen Defi zite wird diskutiert, da diese...

The optimisation of the cyclical adjustment procedure under the German debt brake should focus on how to contribute to a democratically legitimate and sustainable fiscal policy. In this article, we discuss four criteria that should be satisfied: The method must (i) be sufficiently determined,...

Training a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) to achieve a minimum level of MSE is akin to doing Non-Linear Regression (NLR). Therefore, we use available econometric theory and the corresponding tools in R. Only if certain assumptions about the error term in the Data Generating Process are in place,...

Training a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) to achieve a minimum level of MSE is akin to doing Non-Linear Regression (NLR). Therefore, we use available econometric theory and the corresponding tools in R. Only if certain assumptions about the error term in the Data Generating Process are in place,...

Audit correspondence studies are field experiments that test for discriminatory behavior in active markets. Researchers measure discrimination by comparing how responsive individuals ("audited units") are to correspondences from different types of people. This paper elaborates on the tradeoffs...

We write this essay for both lay readers and scientists, though mainstream economists are welcome to enjoy it too. Our subject is the basic toolbox of mainstream economics. The most important tools in this box are demand, supply and equilibrium. All mainstream economists – as well as many...

Many questions in urban and regional economics can be characterized as including both a spatial and a time dimension. However, often one of these dimensions is neglected in empirical work. This paper highlights the danger of methodological inertia, investigating the effect of neglecting the...

We document the extent, nature, and consequences of survey errors in cash welfare and SNAP receipt in three major U.S. household surveys. We find high rates of misreporting, particularly failure to report receipt. The surveys inaccurately capture patterns of multiple program participation, even...

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented policy responses and a large literature evaluating their impacts. This paper re-examines this literature and investigates the role of researchers' degrees-of-flexibility on the estimated effects of mobility-reducing policies on social-distancing...

Disruptive Technologien, globale Krisen und hochkomplexe Wechselwirkungen zwischen Wirtschaft, Recht und Gesellschaft stellen nationale wie supranationale Regulierungsinstanzen vor wachsende Herausforderungen. Insbesondere im Kontext der COVID-19-Pandemie ist daher die Frage nach der Rolle...

The national income and product accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value when the cumulated capital leads to more rental income. From the perspective of resources available intertemporally for consumption, the double-counting issue implies...

Recent research suggests that rates of extreme poverty, commonly defined as living on less than $2/person/day, are high and rising in the United States. We re-examine the rate of extreme poverty by linking 2011 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Current Population...

Recent research suggests that rates of extreme poverty, commonly defined as living on less than $2/person/day, are high and rising in the United States. We re-examine the rate of extreme poverty by linking 2011 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Current Population...

Policymakers are increasingly turning to insights gained from the experimental method as a means of informing public policies. Whether—and to what extent—insights from a research study scale to the level of the broader public is, in many situations, based on blind faith. This scale-up...

Policymakers are increasingly turning to insights gained from the experimental method as a means of informing public policies. Whether—and to what extent—insights from a research study scale to the level of the broader public is, in many situations, based on blind faith. This scale-up...

The national-income accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value as rental income on added capital. The double-counting implies over-statement of levels of GDP and national income. Across countries, those with higher propensities to invest...

The national-income accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value as rental income on added capital. The double-counting implies over-statement of levels of GDP and national income. Across countries, those with higher propensities to invest...

Policymakers are increasingly turning to insights gained from the experimental method as a means of informing public policies. Whether--and to what extent--insights from a research study scale to the level of the broader public is, in many situations, based on blind faith. This scale-up problem...

Recent research suggests that rates of extreme poverty, commonly defined as living on less than $2/person/day, are high and rising in the United States. We re-examine the rate of extreme poverty by linking 2011 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Current Population...

This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice. We compare survey responses of business owners with available data from administrative tax records, brokered...

The national income and product accounts double-count investment, which enters once when it occurs and again in present value when the cumulated capital leads to more rental income. From the perspective of resources available intertemporally for consumption, the double-counting issue implies...

GDP is a closely watched indicator of the current health of the economy and an important tool of economic policy. It has been called one of the great inventions of the 20th Century. It is not, however, a persuasive indicator of individual wellbeing or economic progress. There have been calls to...

PISA is seen as the gold standard for evaluating educational outcomes worldwide. Yet, being a low-stakes exam, students may not take it seriously resulting in downward biased scores and inaccurate rankings. This paper provides a method to identify and account for non-serious behavior in...