International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex...

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...

This study analyzes mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) victim data in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq during the period of the 1960s to 2005. In addition to descriptive analysis of the data, we use regression analysis to identify the determinants of the probability of getting killed by a mine or...

In this paper it is argued that subjective well-being of the individual depends on two types of variables. The first type consists of characteristics of the individual himself, such as age, health, income, etc. The second type of variables consists of the characteristics of the individuals...

In empirical studies it often happens that some variables for some units are far away from the other observations in the sample. These extreme observations, or outliers, often have a large impact on the results of statistical analyses – conclusions based on a sample with and without these...

Time-use researchers are typically interested in the time use of individuals, but time use data are samples of person-days. Given day-to-day variation in how people spend their time, this distinction is analytically important. We examine the conditions necessary to make inferences about the time...

Identification in a regression discontinuity (RD) design hinges on the discontinuity in the probability of treatment when a covariate (assignment variable) exceeds a known threshold. If the assignment variable is measured with error, however, the discontinuity in the first stage relationship...

Despite the widespread use of graphs in empirical research, little is known about readers' ability to process the statistical information they are meant to convey ("visual inference"). We study visual inference within the context of regression discontinuity (RD) designs by measuring how...