The use of historical data has become a standard tool in economics, serving three main purposes: to examine the influence of the past on current economic outcomes; to use unique natural experiments to test modern economic theories; and to use modern economic theories to refine our understanding...

This chapter will cover recent research in historical economics that uses ethnographic data and data from surveys and lab experiments. The study of historical economics, particularly outside of non-Western countries, has been constrained by availability of historical data. However, recent work...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between p-hacking and data-sharing policies for published articles. We collect 38,876 test statistics from 1,106 articles published in leading economic journals between 2002-2020. While a data-sharing policy increases the provision of research data to...

Primary historical sources are often by-passed for secondary sources due to high human costs of accessing and extracting primary information-especially in lower-resource settings. We propose a supervised machine-learning approach to the natural language processing of Chinese historical data. An...

Social surveys are often used to estimate unemployment duration distributions. Survey nonresponse may then cause a bias. We study this using a unique dataset that combines survey information of individual workers with administrative records of the same workers. The latter provide information on...

The Census Tree is the largest-ever database of record links among the historical U.S. censuses, with over 700 million links for people living in the United States between 1850 and 1940. These high-quality links allow researchers in the social sciences and other disciplines to construct a...

We use Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics data and data from a 2008 telephone survey of adults conducted by Westat for the Princeton Data Improvement Initiative (PDII) to explore the importance and feasibility of adding retrospective questions about actual work experience to cross-sectional...

Child labor statistics are critical for assessing the extent and nature of child labor activities in developing countries. In practice, widespread variation exists in how child labor is measured. Questionnaire modules vary across countries and within countries over time along several dimensions,...

Non-compliance of firms with tax regulations is a major constraint on state capacity in developing countries. We focus on an arguably under-appreciated dimension of non-compliance: under-reporting of wages by formal firms to evade payroll taxes. We develop a simple partial-equilibrium model of...

Researchers in many fields, such as demography, economics, and sociology, have established various data collection methodologies and principles to answer a range of academic and policy questions on migration. Although the progress has been impressive, some basic challenges remain. This paper...