While linking records across large administrative datasets ["big data"] has the potential to revolutionize empirical social science research, many administrative data files do not have common identifiers and are thus not designed to be linked to others. To address this problem, researchers have...

The US spends more than 4 trillion dollars per year on health care, largely conducted by private providers and reimbursed by insurers. A major concern in this system is overbilling, waste and fraud by providers, who face incentives to misreport on their claims in order to receive higher...

Using only 34 published tables, we reconstruct five variables (census block, sex, age, race, and ethnicity) in the confidential 2010 Census person records. Using the 38-bin age variable tabulated at the census block level, at most 20.1% of reconstructed records can differ from their confidential...

How accurate is a log-linear approximation of the New Keynesian model when the nominal interest rate is bounded by zero? This paper compares the solution of the exact non-linear model to the log-linear approximation. It finds that the difference is modest. This applies even for extreme events in...

Under stationarity, the heterogeneous stoahastic processes are the non-ergodic ones. We show that if a distributed lag is of finite order, then its coefficients are unconditional means of the underlying random coefficients. This result is applied to linear transformations of the process. The...

We use panel data on charitable donations to analyze how the philanthropic behavior of the Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) compares to that of earlier generations. On the basis of a multivariate analysis with a rich set of economic and demographic variables, we find that conditional on...

ARCH models are widely used to estimate conditional variances and covariances in financial time series models. How successfully can ARCH models carry out this estimation when they are misspecified? How can ARCH models be optimally constructed? Nelson and Foster (1994) employed continuous record...

We propose a simple cross-sectional technique to extract daily factors from economic news released at different times and frequencies. Our approach can effectively handle the large number of different announcements that are relevant for tracking current economic conditions. We apply the...

Correspondence studies have found evidence of age discrimination in callback rates for older workers, but less is known about whether job advertisements can themselves shape the age composition of the applicant pool. We construct job ads for administrative assistant, retail, and security guard...