This policy paper sheds light on current trends in development co-operation for data and statistical systems in developing countries. It analyses trends in funding through official development assistance as well as strategic priorities and modalities for providing support. It identifies...

Consumption of addictive goods is subject to habit formation. Forward-looking individuals must, therefore, be concerned about future prices when making current consumption decisions. We study prices for tobacco products based on a unique data set provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our...

The standard measures of nominal capital formation show the United States investing a proportion of GDP much lower than those of other developed countries throughout the last 25 years and falling further behind over time. In contrast, measures we have calculated in real terms across countries...

Using the Census Bureau's internal March Current Population Surveys (CPS) file, we construct and make available variances and cell means for all topcoded income values in the public-use version of these data. We then provide a procedure that allows researchers with access only to the public-use...

College football fans, coaches, and observers have adopted a set of beliefs about how college football poll voters behave. I document three pieces of conventional wisdom in college football regarding the timing of wins and losses, the value of playing strong opponents, and the value of winning...

Although broad trends in medical spending in the U.S. over the last decade have received widespread attention from policymakers, very little attention has focused on the components of those changes. For many other industries, economists typically divide nominal expenditures by an official...

The local business tax as the main revenue source of local governments in Germany has been under extensive debate for decades. Proposals for reform range from a pure profit tax to an origin-based value-added tax. Local business taxation systems in OECD countries actually represent the whole...

Since attrition in the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) has cumulated to a considerable extent, there is concern that attrition biases empirical analysis. In this paper we compare the performance of four different strategies for estimating an earnings equation in the presence of panel...

This study provides a quantitative review of the empirical literature on gender wage discrimination. Although there is considerable agreement that gender wage discrimination exists, estimates of its magnitude vary widely. Our meta-regression analysis (MRA) reveals that the estimated gender gap...

The goal of this paper is to analyze consumer demand in markets with large price uncertainty. We develop a demand model for goods that are subject to habit formation. We show that consumption plans of forward looking individuals depend not only on preferences and current period prices, but also...