Conventional wisdom says that the middle classes in many developed countries have recently suffered losses, in terms of both the share of the total population belonging to the middle class, and also their share in total income. Here, distribution-free methods are developed for inference on these...

As I document using evidence from a journal data repository that I manage, the datasets used in empirical work are getting larger. When we use very large datasets, it can be dangerous to rely on standard methods for statistical inference. In addition, we need to worry about computational issues....

Inference using difference-in-differences with clustered data requires care. Previous research has shown that t tests based on a cluster-robust variance estimator (CRVE) severely over-reject when there are few treated clusters, that different variants of the wild cluster bootstrap can...