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...

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...

We consider the possibility that demographic variables are measured with errors which arise because household surveys measure demographic structures at a point-in-time, whereas household composition evolves throughout the survey period. We construct and estimate sharp bounds on household size...

Using recent results in the measurement error literature, we show that the official U.S. unemployment rates substantially underestimate the true levels of unemployment, due to misclassification errors in labor force status in Current Population Surveys. Our closed-form identification of the...

The March Current Population Survey (CPS) is the primary data source for estimation of levels and trends in labor earnings and income inequality in the USA. Time-inconsistency problems related to top coding in theses data have led many researchers to use the ratio of the 90th and 10th...

Earnings nonresponse in the Current Population Survey is roughly 30% in the monthly surveys and 20% in the annual March survey. Even if nonresponse is random, severe bias attaches to wage equation coefficient estimates on attributes not matched in the earnings imputation hot deck. If nonresponse...

This paper provides a self-contained introduction to the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), concentrating on aspects relevant to analysis of the distribution of household income. I discuss BHPS design features and how data on net household income are derived. The BHPS net household income...

This essay discusses the multi-dimensional identities of the Hispanic population in the United States as represented in current surveys. It reviews some of the critical barriers in data collection methods that limit research studies on this population. Solutions are suggested that would improve...

Response rates to important surveys used in social science research have been falling precipitously over the last few decades, raising questions about the representativeness of the resulting data and the quality of evidence that comes from it. We examine how partisan preferences influence...