This paper examines the quality of data collected in the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey, which is the source for the Consumer Price Index weights and is the main source of U.S. consumption microdata. We compare reported spending on a large number of categories of goods and services to...

Using internal and public use March Current Population Survey (CPS) data, we analyze trends in US income inequality (1975-2004). We find that the upward trend in income inequality prior to 1993 significantly slowed thereafter once we control for top coding in the public use data and censoring in...

Although the vast majority of US research on trends in the inequality of family income is based on public-use March Current Population Survey (CPS) data, a new wave of research based on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax return data reports substantially higher levels of inequality and faster...

Inconsistent censoring of top earnings in the public-use March Current Population Survey (CPS) is an important limitation in using it to measure labor earnings trends. Using less-censored internal CPS data, combined with Pareto estimates from it for internally censored observations, we create an...

Recent research on United States levels and trends in income inequality vary substantially in how they measure income. Piketty and Saez (2003) examine market income of tax units based on IRS tax return data, DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith (2012) and most CPS-based research uses pre-tax,...

This paper applies the Bates (RFS, 2006) methodology to the problem of estimating and filtering time- changed Lévy processes, using daily data on U.S. stock market excess returns over 1926-2006. In contrast to density-based filtration approaches, the methodology recursively updates the...

While measurement error in the dependent variable does not lead to bias in some well-known cases, with a binary dependent variable the bias can be pronounced. In binary choice, Hausman, Abrevaya and Scott-Morton (1998) show that the marginal effects in the observed data differ from the true ones...

Social media enable promising new approaches to measuring economic activity and analyzing economic behavior at high frequency and in real time using information independent from standard survey and administrative sources. This paper uses data from Twitter to create indexes of job loss, job...

We investigate whether living arrangements respond to an arguably exogenous shift in the distribution of power in family economic decision-making. In the early 1990s, the South African Old Age Pension was expanded to cover most black South Africans above a sex-specific age cut-off resulting in a...

This paper considers the potential role of in-home scanners as a method of data collection for national budget surveys such as the Consumer Expenditure Survey. A detailed comparison is made between scanner data and diary-based budget survey data for food at home in the UK. Levels of recorded...