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...

While recent research finds strong evidence that birth order affects children's outcomes such as education and earnings, the evidence on the effects of birth order on IQ is decidedly mixed. This paper uses a large dataset on the population of Norway that allows us to precisely measure birth...

How do families influence the ability of children? Cognitive skills have been shown to be a strong predictor of educational attainment and future labor market success; as a result, understanding the determinants of cognitive skills can lead to a better understanding of children's long run...

Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts...

Despite a broad consensus on the need to take into account the value of public services and geographical cost of living differences when measuring poverty, there is little reliable evidence on how these factors actually affect poverty estimates. Unlike the standard approach in studies of the...

Using Norwegian intergenerational data with a substantial part of the life-cycle earnings of children and almost the entire life-cycle earnings for their fathers, we present new estimates of intergenerational mobility. Extending the length of the fathers' earnings windows from 5 to 30 years...

Based on Norwegian register data we show that having a lone parent in the terminal phase of life significantly affects the offspring's labor market activity. The employment propensity declines by around 1 percentage point among sons and 2 percentage points among daughters during the years just...

Empirical studies have found that cannabis commonly precedes consumption of drugs like amphetamine, ecstasy, cocaine and heroin. As a result a causal linkage between cannabis and subsequent hard drug use has been hypothesized. Despite mixed empirical evidence and a limited understanding of...