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...

Surveys are an essential approach for eliciting otherwise invisible factors such as perceptions, knowledge and beliefs, attitudes, and reasoning. These factors are critical determinants of social, economic, and political outcomes. Surveys are not merely a research tool. They are also not only a...

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...

Primary historical sources are often by-passed for secondary sources due to high human costs of accessing and extracting primary information-especially in lower-resource settings. We propose a supervised machine-learning approach to the natural language processing of Chinese historical data. An...

Measurement errors are often a large source of bias in survey data. Lack of knowledge of the determinants of such errors makes it difficult for data producers to reduce the extent of errors and for data users to assess the validity of analyses using the data. We study the determinants of...

We evaluate how nonresponse affects conclusions drawn from survey data and consider how researchers can reliably test and correct for nonresponse bias. To do so, we examine a survey on labor market conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic that used randomly assigned financial incentives to...

Remote work surged during the Covid pandemic but there is disagreement about the extent of the change. To address this question, we field a new, nationally-representative survey: the Remote Life Survey (RLS). We find that in October 2020, 31.6 percent of the continuously employed workforce...

Underrepresentation of minority and poor households in scientific studies undermines policy decisions and public health. We study data from a serological study that randomized participation incentives. Participation is low (6% at $0, 17% at $100, 29% at $500) and unequal: minority and poor...

We combine a customized survey and randomized controlled trial (RCT) to study the effect of higher-order beliefs on U.S. retail investors' portfolio allocations. We find that investors' higher-order beliefs about stock market returns are correlated with but distinct from their first-order...

We summarize the economics of recycling municipal solid waste. OECD data suggest that aggregate recycling rates in member countries have plateaued in recent decades. United States recycling rates for some materials remain low, even after decades of learning and participation. Major new policies...