Detecting heterogeneity within a population is crucial in many economic and financial applications. Econometrically, this requires a credible determination of multimodality in a given data distribution. We propose a straightforward yet effective technique for mode inference in discrete data...

When merging firms across large databases in the absence of common identifiers, text algorithms can help. I propose a high-performance fuzzy firm name matching algorithm that uses existing computational methods and works even under hardware restrictions. The algorithm consists of four steps,...