How do people compare bundles of social-distancing behaviors? During the COVID pandemic, we showed 676 online respondents in the US, UK, and Israel 30 pairs of brief videos of acquaintances meeting. We asked them to indicate which in each pair depicted greater risk of COVID infection. Their...

National surveys are crucial for estimating key economic aggregates, including the unemployment rate, labor force participation, and household expenditures. The accuracy of these indicators is increasingly under scrutiny due to declining response rates and the consequent risk of nonresponse...

We propose a method to correct estimates from historical linked data for bias arising from type-I error--"false matches." We estimate the rate of false matching from the disagreement rate in characteristics that should agree across the two linked datasets. Combined with an understanding of the...

The concept of differential privacy (DP) has gained substantial attention in recent years, most notably since the U.S. Census Bureau announced the adoption of the concept for its 2020 Decennial Census. However, despite its attractive theoretical properties, implementing DP in practice remains...

Statistical agencies have a dual mandate to provide accurate data and protect the privacy and confidentiality of data subjects. These mandates are fundamentally at odds and therefore must be balanced: more accurate data reduces privacy, while privacy protections introduce error that reduces...

Econometricians invest substantial effort in constructing standard errors that yield valid inference under a hypothetical data-generating process. This paper asks a fundamental question: Are the uncertainty statements reported by applied researchers consistent with empirical frequencies? The...

In a fuzzy regression discontinuity (RD) design, the probability of treatment jumps when a running variable (R) passes a threshold (R0). Fuzzy RD estimates are obtained via a procedure analogous to two-stage least squares (2SLS), where an indicator I(R R0) plays the role of the instrument....

Empirical research in the social and medical sciences frequently involves testing multiple hypotheses simultaneously, increasing the risk of false positives due to chance. Classical multiple testing procedures, such as the Bonferroni correction, control the family-wise error rate (FWER) but tend...

Dependent variables that are non-negative, follow right-skewed distributions, and have large probability mass at zero arise often in empirical economics. Two classes of models that transform the dependent variable y -- the natural logarithm of y plus a constant and the inverse hyperbolic sine --...

We propose a general simulation-based procedure for estimating quality of approximate policies in heterogeneous-agent equilibrium models, which allows to verify that such approximate solutions describe a near-rational equilibrium. Our procedure endows agents with superior knowledge of the future...