Unlike most of the earlier U.S. time-use surveys, the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) does not collect information on secondary activities. It does, however, include a set of questions asking respondents to identify times when a child under 13 was "in your care." The goal of these questions is...

Measurement errors are often a large source of bias in survey data. Lack of knowledge of the determinants of such errors makes it difficult for data producers to reduce the extent of errors and for data users to assess the validity of analyses using the data. We study the determinants of...

We present a method to conduct automated surveys over WhatsApp, a globally popular messaging service. WhatsApp surveys offer potential advantages since they incur relatively low costs to respondents and researchers, are easy to use for respondents who are already familiar with WhatsApp chat...

Gender gaps in financial literacy are pervasive and persistent. They are partly explained because women choose "I do not know" more frequently. We test for the effectiveness of three interventions to shift this behavior. The control survey includes the possibility of "I do not know". The three...

In this paper we develop a discrete model of optimal taxation of married couples and empirically discuss the optimality of income taxation for this group. To this end, we derive the social welfare function which guarantees that joint taxation of married couples is optimal. We will contrast this...

The paper examines the motivations behind the important migration from Burkina Faso to Côte d'Ivoire, the economic pole in the West African Economic and Monetary Union. The paper uses a detailed household survey dataset on migration, natural resource management, risk management and solidarity...

This paper investigates gender differences in smoking behavior using data from the German Socio-economic Panel (SOEP). We develop a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method for count data models which allows to isolate the part of the gender differential in the number of cigarettes daily smoked that...

Although past research has found strong social class effects on the decision to undertake higher education in the UK, there is only sparse empirical work investigating social class influences on the choice of degree subject at the undergraduate level. Using Universities' Statistical Record data...

This paper analyzes the mobility between self-employment, wage employment and non-employment. Using data for men in West Germany, we find strong true state dependence in all three states. Moreover, compared to wage employment, non-employment increases the probability of self-employment...

The Wooldridge method is based on a simple and novel strategy to deal with the initial values problem in the nonlinear dynamic random-effects panel data models. This characteristic of the method makes it very attractive in empirical applications. However, its finite sample performance is not...