Nominal wage stickiness is an important component of recent medium-scale macroeconomic models, but to date there has been little microeconomic evidence supporting the assumption of sluggish nominal wage adjustment. We present evidence on the frequency of nominal wage adjustment using data from...

Household income is difficult to measure, since it requires collecting information about all potential income sources for each member of a household. We assess the effects of two types of edit check questions on measurement error and survey estimates: within-wave edit checks use responses to...

In this paper I investigate response bias in survey data on annual driving mileage and evaluate the performance of a proposed remedy, Orbit. Individuals systematically exaggerate their deviation from the sample average, and using the self-reported data leads to misleading estimates of the income...

Comparing groups with respect to hypothetical constructs requires that the measurement models are equal across groups. Otherwise conclusions drawn from the observed indicators regarding differences at the latent level (mean differences, differences in the structural relations) might be severly...

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences. While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologists rather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suffer from distinct weaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in the...

Measurement error is a common phenomenon in the empirical sciences. Longitudinal data can especially be affected by it, as measurement error can influence measures of change, which is one of the primary reasons for collecting longitudinal data in panel surveys. However, measurement error in...

After several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation (CV) method a consistent behavioral explanation of 'hypothetical bias' is still lacking. Based on evidence from economics, economic psychology and the political sciences, I propose an explanation that is based on two simple...

Der 2009 im Handel durchgeführte "Test des Tests" durchlief bis zur endgültigen Version verschiedene Konzeptionsphasen. Zunächst wurden die Fragebögen der früheren Meta-Umfragen als Orientierungsmaßstab insbesondere hinsichtlich Zielvorstellung, Wortlaut und Umfang herangezogen und auf die...

Obwohl die Frage, ob der Capability Ansatz überhaupt operationalisierbar ist, von Beginn an und bis heute diskutiert wird, gibt es inzwischen eine Fülle von empirischen Studien auf der Grundlage des Capability Ansatzes. Die meisten basieren auf Daten aus Befragungen (im Unterschied zu bspw....

Trust is a concept that has attracted significant attention in economic theory and research within the last two decades: it has been applied in a number of contexts and has been investigated both as an explanatory and as a dependent variable. In this paper, we explore the questions of what...