The international development community has used the World Bank's Statistical Capacity Index since its inception in 2004. The Sustainable Development Goals create new challenges for national statistical systems to produce high-quality and internationally comparable data. This paper reviews...

A country's statistical capacity takes an indispensable part in its development. We offer a comprehensive comparison between the World Bank's Statistical Performance Indicators and Index (SPI) and its predecessor, the Statistical Capacity Index (SCI) regarding different conceptual and empirical...

Country statistical capacity is increasingly recognized as crucial for development, but no academic study exists that reviews the available assessment tools. We offer the first review study that fills this gap, paying particular attention to data and practical measurement challenges. We compare...

Using internal and public use March Current Population Survey data, we analyze trends in US income inequality (19752004). Using a multiple imputation approach where values for censored observations are imputed using draws from a Generalized Beta distribution of the Second Kind, we find that the...

This note argues that nonparametric regression not only relaxes functional form assumptions vis-a-vis parametric regression, but that it also permits endogenous control variables. To control for selection bias or to make an exclusion restriction in instrumental variables regression valid,...

A longstanding question in the economics of the family is the relationship between sibship size and subsequent human capital formation and economic welfare. If there is a causal "quantity-quality tradeoff," then policies that discourage large families should lead to increased human capital,...

Choosing among a number of available treatments the most suitable for a given subject is an issue of everyday concern. A physician has to choose an appropriate drug treatment or medical treatment for a given patient, based on a number of observed covariates X and prior experience. A case worker...

Matching estimators are widely used in statistical data analysis. However, the distribution of matching estimators has been derived only for particular cases (Abadie and Imbens, 2006). This article establishes a martingale representation for matching estimators. This representation allows the...

We examine differences in the value of statistical life (VSL) across potential wage levels in panel data using quantile regressions with intercept heterogeneity. Latent heterogeneity is econometrically important and affects the estimated VSL. Our findings indicate that a reasonable average cost...