Using recent results in the measurement error literature, we show that the official U.S. unemployment rates substantially underestimate the true levels of unemployment, due to misclassification errors in labor force status in Current Population Surveys. Our closed-form identification of the...

Using recent results in the measurement error literature, we show that the official U.S. unemployment rates substantially underestimate the true levels of unemployment, due to misclassification errors in labor force status in Current Population Surveys. Our closed-form identification of the...

Response rates to important surveys used in social science research have been falling precipitously over the last few decades, raising questions about the representativeness of the resulting data and the quality of evidence that comes from it. We examine how partisan preferences influence...

Labor market indicators are critical for policymakers, but measurement error in labor force survey data is known to be substantial. In this paper, I quantify the implications of classification errors in the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS), in which respondents misreport their true labor...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...

In this paper we investigate two stages in the process that leads to participation in ALMP programs. We use unique administrative data from the Austrian unemployment registers which allow us to distinguish between caseworker assignment and actual program enrollment. Although 25% of newly...