The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the use of patent citation data in social science research. Facilitated by digitization of the patent data and increasing computing power, a community of practice has grown up that has developed methods for using these data to: measure...

Early life experiences are likely to be important for the formation of preferences. Religiosity is a key dimension of preferences, affecting many economic outcomes. This paper examines the effect of college major on religiosity, and the converse effect of religiosity on college major, using...

Virtually all social science research related to obesity uses body mass index (BMI), usually calculated using self-reported values of weight and height, or clinical weight classifications based on BMI. Yet there is wide agreement in the medical literature that such measures are seriously flawed...

Linking individuals across historical datasets relies on information such as name and age that is both non-unique and prone to enumeration and transcription errors. These errors make it impossible to find the correct match with certainty. In the first part of the paper, we suggest a fully...

Global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, often shell companies in tax havens, which obscures their nationality in aggregate statistics. We associate the universe of traded securities with their issuer's ultimate parent and restate bilateral investment positions to better...

This paper develops a new procedure for assessing how well a given dynamic economic model describes a set of economic time series. To answer the question, the variables in the model are augmented with just enough error so that the model can exactly mimic the second moment properties of the...

This paper introduces a class of statistical tests for the hypothesis that some feature of a data set is common to several variables. A feature is detected in a single series by a hypothesis test where the null is that it is absent, and the alternative is that it is present. Examples are serial...

New results on the exact small sample distribution of the instrumental variable estimator are presented by studying an important special case. The exact closed forms for the probability density and cumulative distribution functions are given. There are a number of surprising findings. The small...

Recent research suggests that rates of extreme poverty, commonly defined as living on less than $2/person/day, are high and rising in the United States. We re-examine the rate of extreme poverty by linking 2011 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and Current Population...

Police use of force – particularly lethal force – is one of the most divisive issues of the twenty-first century. To understand the nexus of race, criminal justice, and police brutality, academics and journalists have begun to amass impressive datasets on Officer-Involved-Shootings (OIS). I...