Most development models emphasize a growth in the scope of individual choice as the law becomes impartial, relevant to all. An early expression of this conceptualization appeared in the 19th century, when Henry Maine coined his celebrated dictum that progressive societies move from status to...

This paper addresses the steep learning curve in Machine Learning faced by non-computer scientists, particularly social scientists, stemming from the absence of a primer on its fundamental principles. I adopt a pedagogical strategy inspired by the adage ”once you understand OLS, you can work...

The history of England's institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England’s institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two...

This paper presents novel evidence for the prevalence of deviations from rational behavior in human decision making – and for the corresponding causes and consequences. The analysis is based on move-by-move data from chess tournaments and an identification strategy that compares behavior of...

Understanding behavioral aspects of collective decision-making is an important challenge for eco-nomics, and narratives are a crucial group-based mechanism that influences human decision-making. This paper introduces the Character-Role Narrative Framework as a tool to systematically analyze...

We propose a new method to design a short survey measure of a complex concept such as women's agency. The approach combines mixed-methods data collection and machine learning. We select the best survey questions based on how strongly correlated they are with a "gold standard" measure of the...

We discover and document errors in public use microdata samples ("PUMS files") of the 2000 Census, the 2003-2006 American Community Survey, and the 2004-2009 Current Population Survey. For women and men ages 65 and older, age- and sex-specific population estimates generated from the PUMS files...

Chen and Zadrozny (1998) developed the linear extended Yule-Walker (XYW) method for determining the parameters of a vector autoregressive (VAR) model with available covariances of mixed-frequency observations on the variables of the model. If the parameters are determined uniquely for available...

This paper discusses the choice of the number of participants for within-subjects (WS) designs and between-subjects (BS) designs based on simulations of statistical power allowing for different numbers of experimental periods. We illustrate the usefulness of the approach in the context of field...

The monthly ifo Business Survey is the basis for numerous economic indicators, such as the ifo Business Climate Index Germany. Moreover, the anonymized micro data can be used for a wide range of research projects. In order to obtain robust results, the panel of survey participants must be large...