Gaining valid answers to so-called sensitive questions is an age-old problem in survey research. Various techniques have been developed to guarantee anonymity and minimize the respondent's feelings of jeopardy. Two such techniques are the randomized response technique (RRT) and the unmatched...

Education is one of the key resources in the fight against poverty. While substantial progress has been made in terms of school enrollment, evidence suggests that educational quality is still alarmingly low in many developing countries. Various explanations have been suggested, but one very...

Good teachers are the backbone of a successful education system. Yet, in developing countries, teachers' content knowledge is often inadequate. This study documents that primary school math teachers in the department of Moraz'an in El Salvador only master 47 percent of the curriculum they teach....

In spring 2011, the students of the University of Bern and ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Switzerland were invited to participate in an online survey called "Exams and written papers" ("Prüfungen und schriftliche Arbeiten an der Universität Bern" at the University of...

Self-administered online surveys provide a higher level of privacy protection to respondents than surveys administered by an interviewer. Yet, studies indicate that asking sensitive questions is problematic also in self-administered surveys. Because respondents might not be willing to reveal the...

Graphical display of regression results has become increasingly popular in presentations and the scientific literature because, in many cases, graphs are much easier to read than tables. In Stata, such plots can be produced by the marginsplot command. However, while marginsplot is very versatile...

Eliciting truthful answers to sensitive questions is an age-old problem in survey research. Respondents tend to underreport socially undesired or illegal behaviors while overreporting socially desirable ones. To combat such response bias, various techniques have been developed that are geared...

Least-squares regression is a major workhorse in applied research. Yet its estimates may be deemed nonrobust under various conditions. One example is heavy-tailed error distributions, in which least-squares estimation may lose its cutting edge with respect to efficiency. More importantly,...