This report, prepared for the Committee on Economic Statistics of the American Economic Association, examines the state of available data for the study of international trade and foreign direct investment. Data on values of imports and exports of goods are of high quality and coverage, but price...

We use Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics data and data from a 2008 telephone survey of adults conducted by Westat for the Princeton Data Improvement Initiative (PDII) to explore the importance and feasibility of adding retrospective questions about actual work experience to cross-sectional...

Thanks to extraordinary and exponential improvements in data storage and computing capacities, it is now possible to collect, manage, and analyze data in magnitudes and in manners that would have been inconceivable just a short time ago. As the world has developed this remarkable capacity to...

States, which have the primary legal role in regulating the prescribing and dispensing of prescription medications, have created Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMP) to try to reduce inappropriate prescribing, dispensing, and related harm. Research assessing whether these interventions...

The goal of this paper is to lay out a methodology and corresponding computer algorithms, that allow us to extract the detailed data on inventors contained in patents, and harness it for economic research. Patent data has long been used in empirical research in economics, and yet the information...

The presence of different prices in different databases for the same securities can impair the comparability of research efforts and seriously damage the management decisions based upon such research. In this study we compare the six major sources of corporate Credit Default Swap prices: GFI,...

This paper investigates whether larger quantities of historical data affect a firm's ability to maintain market share in Internet search. We study whether the length of time that search engines retained their server logs affected the apparent accuracy of subsequent searches. Our analysis...

All empirical researchers know that having more sources of variation in a dataset is valuable. What is not known is how valuable, and if the marginal value of adding another source of variation diminishes or increases. This note provides explicit answers to these questions. It defines "valuable"...