The growing labor force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the %u201Ccrowd-out%u201D of existing childcare arrangements, the...

There are two broad classes of models used to address the econometric problems caused by skewness in data commonly encountered in health care applications: (1) transformation to deal with skewness (e.g., OLS on ln(y)); and (2) alternative weighting approaches based on exponential conditional...

Statistical offices try to match item models when measuring inflation between two periods. However, for product areas with a high turnover of differentiated models, the use of hedonic indexes is more appropriate since they include the prices and quantities of unmatched new and old models. The...

This review of data problems in econometrics has been prepared for the Handbook of Econometrics (Vol. 3, Chap. 25, forthcoming). It starts with a review of the ambivalent relationship between data and econometricians, emphasizing the largely second-hand nature of economic data and the...

The integration of the annual I-O accounts with the GDP-by-industry accounts is the most recent in a series of improvements to the industry accounts provided by the BEA in recent years. BEA prepares two sets of national industry accounts: The I-O accounts, which consist of the benchmark I-O...

This paper explores the role of model uncertainty in explaining the different findings in the literature regarding the effect of shall-issue right-to-carry concealed weapons laws on crime. In particular, we systematically examine how different modeling assumptions affect the results. We find...

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 "quantity-quality trade-off," then policies that discourage large families should lead to increased human capital, higher...