Large literatures have analyzed racial and ethnic disparities in economic outcomes and access to the safety net. For such analyses that rely on survey data, it is crucial that survey accuracy does not vary by race and ethnicity. Otherwise, the observed disparities may be confounded by...

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has experienced a growing wage differential: high-skilled workers have claimed an increasing share of available income, while low-skilled workers have seen an absolute decline in real wages. How and why this disparity has arisen is a matter of ongoing...

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compare the cost of living and welfare across countries, while incorporating product variety measured by the count of barcodes or firms. For 47 countries, we compare welfare relative to the United States to conventional measures of real...

The proposed change under the American Families Plan (AFP) to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) Child Tax Credit (CTC) would increase maximum benefit amounts to $3,000 or $3,600 per child (up from $2,000 per child) and make the full credit available to all low and middle-income families...

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. We show that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on...

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...

We investigate how material well-being has changed over time for single mother headed families--the primary group affected by welfare reform and other policy changes of the 1990s. We focus on consumption as well as other indicators including components of consumption, measures of housing...

This paper is the first to examine changes in poverty over time using a comprehensive set of linked survey and administrative data, implementing recommendations of the Interagency Technical Working Group on Evaluating Alternative Measures of Poverty. Using the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID),...

We examine the distribution of household consumption, income and savings from 2019 through the end of 2020 using the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) and other data. This is the first work to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic well-being using nationally representative...

Measurement errors are often a large source of bias in survey data. Lack of knowledge of the determinants of such errors makes it difficult for data producers to reduce the extent of errors and for data users to assess the validity of analyses using the data. We study the determinants of...