Often, economic policies are directed toward outcomes that are measured as counts. Examples of economic variables that use a basic counting scale are number of children as an indicator of fertility, number of doctor visits as an indicator of health care demand, and number of days absent from...

We show how the rootogram - a graphical tool associated with the work of J. W. Tukey and originally used for assessing goodness of fit of univariate distributions - can help to diagnose and treat issues such as overdispersion and/or excess zeros in regression models for count data. Two empirical...