Kremer, Willis, and You (2021) revisit cross-country convergence patterns over the last six decades. They provide evidence that the lack of convergence that applied early in the sample has now been replaced by modest convergence. They also argue this relationship is driven by convergence in...

The labor force participation rate of older men under age 65 has shown a significant recent decline. Cross-sectional studies linking early retirement to increased Social Security income have also made explicit or implicit temporal projections of changes in participation in response to changes in...

The recent digitization of complete count census data is an extraordinary opportunity for social scientists to create large longitudinal datasets by linking individuals from one census to another or from other sources to the census. We evaluate different automated methods for record linkage,...

This paper overviews the research opportunities made possible by a NIA-funded program project, Early Indicators, Intergenerational Processes, and Aging. Data collection began almost three decades ago on 40,000 soldiers from the Union Army in the US Civil War. The sample contains extensive...

We report results from our long-standing research partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. We make two primary contributions. First, we illustrate the wide range of informative analyses that can be conducted using a state longitudinal data system and...

To what extent is the recent spike in inflation driven by a change in its permanent component? We estimate a semi-structural model of output, inflation, and the nominal interest rate in the United States over the period 1900-2021. The model predicts that between 2019 and 2021 the permanent...

This note demonstrates that Bennett McCallum's recent critique of low frequency estimates of macro-economic relationships is of little empirical significance. It also demonstrates that readily available and frequently used techniques can be used to diagnose the problem McCallum raises. Finally,...

Standard inference in cointegrating models is fragile because it relies on an assumption of an I(1) model for the common stochastic trends, which may not accurately describe the data's persistence. This paper discusses efficient low-frequency inference about cointegrating vectors that is robust...

Dealing with endogenous regressors is a central challenge of applied research. The standard solution is to use instrumental variables that are assumed to be uncorrelated with unobservables. We instead assume (i) the correlation between the instrument and the error term has the same sign as the...