Young children are required to use child safety seats, and the age threshold at which children can legally graduate to seat belts has steadily increased. This paper tests the relative effectiveness of child safety seats, lap-and-shoulder seat belts, and lap belts in preventing injuries among...

Measurement of seat belt and air bag effectiveness is complicated by the fact that systematic data are collected only for crashes in which a fatality occurs. These data suffer from sample selection since seat belt and air bag usage influences survival rates which in turn determine whether a...

This paper demonstrates that short sales are often misclassified as buyer-initiated by the Lee-Ready and other commonly used trade classification algorithms. This result is due in part to regulations which require short sales be executed on an uptick or zero-uptick. In addition, while the...

Characterizing the work that people do on their jobs is a longstanding and core issue in labor economics. Traditionally, classification has been done manually. If it were possible to combine new computational tools and administrative wage records to generate an automated crosswalk between job...

Detailed country-by-country chronologies are an informative companion piece to our paper “Exchange Arrangements Entering the 21st Century: Which Anchor Will Hold?,” which provides a comprehensive history of anchor or reference currencies, exchange rate arrangements, and a new measure of...

This paper provides a comprehensive history of anchor or reference currencies, exchange rate arrangements, and a new measure of foreign exchange restrictions for 194 countries and territories over 1946-2016. We find that the often-cited post-Bretton Woods transition from fixed to flexible...

Do middle-income countries face difficult challenges producing consistent growth? Using transition matrix analysis, we can easily reject any unconditional notion of a “middle-income trap” in the data. However, countries have different fundamentals and policies. Using a nonparametric...

While measurement error in the dependent variable does not lead to bias in some well-known cases, with a binary dependent variable the bias can be pronounced. In binary choice, Hausman, Abrevaya and Scott-Morton (1998) show that the marginal effects in the observed data differ from the true ones...

Almost $10 trillion is benchmarked to Morgan Stanley Capital International's Developed, Emerging, Frontier, and standalone market indexes. Reclassifications from one index to another require thousands of investors to decide how to react. We study a comprehensive sample of past reclassifications...

We measure and examine data error in health, education and income statistics used to construct the Human Development Index. We identify three sources of data error which are due to (i) data updating, (ii) formula revisions and (iii) thresholds to classify a country's development status. We...