Macroeconomic data are indispensable for modern governance, yet it is often unclear how reliable these data are. The production process of macroeconomic data inside the statistical offices is often not very transparent for the general public. Bystanders usually have no choice but to take for...

Inference using large datasets is not nearly as straightforward as conventional econometric theory suggests when the disturbances are clustered, even with very small intra-cluster correlations. The information contained in such a dataset grows much more slowly with the sample size than it would...

The EU's Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), launched in 2003, was the first micro-level data set to provide comprehensive data on incomes and other social and economic domains over the enlarged EU. This paper draws on two programmes of research to ask how well the EU-SILC has...