Reliable measures of obesity are essential in order to develop effective policies to tackle the costs of obesity. We examine what, if anything, we can learn about obesity rates using self-reported BMI once we allow for possible measurement error. Existing approaches that correct for...

Reliable measures of body composition are essential in order to develop effective policies to tackle the costs of obesity. To date the lack of an acceptable gold-standard for measuring fatness has made it difficult to evaluate alternative measures of obesity. In this paper we draw on work in...

This paper uses data on 9 year old Irish children to examine the determinants of mathematical achievement among young children. We find that boys perform better in maths than girls and that this gender gap is driven by differences at the top of the achievement distribution. While there is no...

This paper uses data on both self-reported and true measures of individual Body Mass Index (BMI) to examine the nature of measurement error in self-reported BMI and to look at the consequences of using self-reported measures when estimating the effect of BMI on economic outcomes. In keeping with...

This paper examines the patterns of black-white wage convergence for full-time males over the last two decades. In contrast to earlier studies of black-white wage convergence that focused on mean wages, we analyze convergence patterns throughout the wage distribution. In particular, we focus on...

There is considerable debate about the role of wage rigidity in explaining unemployment. Despite a large body of empirical work, no consensus has emerged on the extent of wage rigidity. Previous attempts to empirically examine wage rigidity have been hampered by small samples and measurement...

Using data on approximately 1240 games of bowling we examine the statistical properties of 10-pin bowling scores. We find evidence that that the distribution of bowling scores is approximately log-normally distributed with a common variance across players. This allows us to consider the...

In this paper we use a semi-parmaetric procedure developed by DiNardo et al(1996),to examine the distribution of the racial wage gap in the U.S and to examine the extent to which forces underlying this wage gap vary throughout the distribution. In carrying out our analyses, we focus on recent...

The high growth rates experienced in Ireland over the last 10 years has resulted in a tightening of the labour market which is reflected in the number of unfilled vacancies reported by firms. At the same time wage inequality has increased leading to greater demands being placed on the government...

This note describes and illustrates a new Stata program, gmmcovearn, that estimates the covariance structure of earnings for a variety of models using the GMM estimator. The program estimates models that incorporate time factor loadings and cohort factor loadings on both the transitory and...