It turns out that price index functions share a basic interpretation; practically all of them measure a change in some average of quality-adjusted prices. The different options are distinguished by their choice of average, their definition of quality, and their stance on what I label ‘equal...

I consider the “supply-side” of corruption in the context of international bribery, which I define as firms bribing public officials abroad. I present the “Bribe Payers Corruption Index” (BPCI), a non perception-based measure of cross-border corruption, which is coherent with a simple...

A new measure of cross-national corruption is constructed based on the geographic distribution of public officials involved in cross-border corruption cases. A comparison is made between the Public Administration Corruption Index (PACI) and perception-based measures, considers the extent to...

Policy makers depend on economists, statisticians, and other social scientists to make accurate observations and draw solid conclusions from quantitative analysis. Econometrics, for example, has come a long way in the past century and guides many decisions made today. On the other hand, some...

We describe methods of combining administrative and survey data to improve the measurement of income. We begin by decomposing the total survey error in the mean of survey reports of dollars received from a government transfer program. We decompose this error into three parts, generalized...

We analyze the distributional properties of ownership concentration measures and find that measures come from different underlying statistical distributions. Consistent with theory, some measures that are classified to represent a monitoring dimension have a positive influence on firm performance;...

The economics of obesity literature implicitly assumes that measured anthropometrics are error-free and they are often treated as a gold standard when compared to self-reported data. We use factor mixture models to analyse and characterize measurement error in both self-reported and measured...

We propose a set of axioms for the measurement of school-based segregation withany number of ethnic groups. These axioms are motivated by two criteria. The first isevenness: how much do ethnic groups’ distributions across schools differ? The secondis representativeness: how different are...

We examine the problem of measuring the extent to which students with different income levels attend separate schools. Unless rich and poor attend the same schools in the same proportions, some segregation will exist. Since income is a continuous cardinal variable, however, the rich-poor...

This paper discusses and analyzes selected pertinent statistical and economic questions raised by the shift in price statistics towards covering broader markets of the economy, namely introducing a Producers Price Index (PPI) series in place of the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) series in Egypt...