We present the results of a randomized intervention to study how teaching financial literacy to 16-year old high-school students affects their behavior in risk and time preference tasks. Compared to two different control treatments, we find that teaching financial literacy makes subjects behave...

Little is known about the size and determinants of undeclared work. While approaches to measure the shadow economy have been extensively discussed, conventional surveys dominate research on undeclared work. We review and extend this literature by first referring to the most recent survey data on...

We derive bounds on the causal effect of belief-dependent preferences (reciprocity and guilt aversion) on choices in sequential two-player games without exploiting information or data on the (higher-order) beliefs of players. We show how informative bounds can be derived by exploiting a specific...

Hamilton (2018) suggests that the Kilian (2009) index of global real economic activity is misleading and calls for alternative measures. The problem documented by Hamilton is a consequence of a coding mistake. Specifically, the index of nominal freight rates underlying the Kilian index was...

The concept of electoral competition plays a central role in many subfields of political science, but no consensus exists on how to measure it. One key challenge is how to conceptualize and measure electoral competitiveness at the district level across alternative electoral systems. Recent...

This study is the first scientific attempt to calculate the size of the informal economy in agriculture. The Multiple indicators multiple causes model (MIMIC) was developed for the estimation of levels of informal economy in 15 “Old” European Union Member States’ agricultural sectors for...

Surveys that measure subjective states like happiness or preferences often generate discrete ordinal data. Ordered response models, which are commonly used to analyze such data, suffer from a fundamental identification problem. Their conclusions depend on unjustified assumptions about the...

Religious adherence has been hard to study in part because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can...

An experiment using a representative survey of the German population shows that letting respondents report a number rather than asking them to choose from a list of predefined ranges lowers the response rate for both perceived past and expected inflation and decreases (increases) reported past...

There is an emerging consensus that teachers impact multiple student outcomes, but it remains unclear how to summarize these multiple dimensions of teacher effectiveness into simple metrics that can be used for research or personnel decisions. Here, we discuss the implications of estimating...