Federal statistical agencies in the United States and analogous agencies elsewhere commonly report official economic statistics as point estimates, without accompanying measures of error. Users of the statistics may incorrectly view them as error-free or may incorrectly conjecture error...

This study examines the impact of access to confidential administrative data on the rate, direction, and policy relevance of economics research. To study this question, we exploit the progressive geographic expansion of the U.S. Census Bureau's Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDCs)....

This paper documents that rotation group bias -- the tendency for labor force statistics to vary systematically by month in sample in labor force surveys -- in the Current Population Survey (CPS) has worsened considerably over time. The estimated unemployment rate for earlier rotation groups has...

We examine the empirical evidence on the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany using the Campbell-Shiller (1991) regressions and a vector-autoregressive" methodology. We argue that anomalies in the U.S. term...

The Value of Statistical Life (VSL) is arguably the most important number in benefit-cost analyses of environmental, health, and transportation policies. However, agencies have used a wide range of VSL values. One reason may be the embarrassment of riches when it comes to VSL studies. While...

We introduce the concept of a triad census of a digraph arid show how it can be used to enumerate various types of subgraph configurations. We give the basic probabilities needed for computing means and variances for a triad census under the U-MAN distribution for digraphs. These concepts are...

This paper combines information from two sources of U.S. private payroll employment to increase the accuracy of real-time measurement of the labor market. The sources are the Current Employment Statistics (CES) from BLS and microdata from the payroll processing firm ADP. We briefly describe the...

FDI plays a central role in managing global production networks, but FDI statistics also reflect other factors, including tax avoidance, that make it difficult to differentiate between FDI for "long-term" investments that serves as a source of growth and FDI that is purely financial and has...

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, researchers are reporting findings of randomized trials comparing standard care with care augmented by experimental drugs. The trials have small sample sizes, so estimates of treatment effects are imprecise. Seeing imprecision, clinicians reading research...

It is widely recognized that the economics of distant-future events, like climate change, is critically dependent upon the choice of a discount rate. Unfortunately, it is unclear how to discount distant-future events when the future discount rate itself is unknown. In previous work, an...