A continuous and a discrete rating scale were implemented for a single item happiness question in a representative survey. A randomized controlled experiment enables unique analyses on data quality and distributions, which suggest superiority of the continuous scale. Results raise doubts about...

The poverty mapping methodology for estimating welfare rankings from small areas has proven to be useful in guiding allocation of government funds, regional planning, and general policy formulation. Nevertheless, poverty mapping also suffers from a series of by now well recognized shortcomings....

The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is a rotational panel provided by Eurostat that covers important variables over all EU Member States. Unfortunately, Eurostat provides separate data sets which do not cover all waves. Furthermore, information on monthly...

Over many past decades countries in sub-Saharan Africa have received extensive bilateral and multilateral aid in support of the production of relevant, timely, and good quality data and statistics. But assessing aid effectiveness in the statistical area is a complex matter. Many datasets are...

Studies of transition economy labor markets have typically relied on standard, publicly available employment and unemployment statistics. This paper analyzes microdata on detailed labor force survey responses in Russia, Romania, and Estonia to measure nonstandard, boundary forms and alternative...

The basic concept of multiple imputation is straightforward and easy to understand, but the application to real data imposes many implementation problems. To define useful imputation models for a dataset that consists of categorical and of continuous variables with distributions that are...

The re-analysis of statistical data is an effective means of protecting the public from undiscovered errors in social science research. Re-analysis is critical, as there is no difference between official data and non-official data. However, discussions concerning data protection legislation do...

Much emphasis on the sectoral perspective in economics originates in the observation of the diverse and contingent nature of competitive behaviour, where a firm's performance depends on the capability to match its organisation and strategy to the technological, social and economic restrictions...

Based on the hypothesis that microdata are of crucial importance for internationally competitive economic research and scientific advice in economic and social policy, the authors develop various proposals for an improved data supply for empirical work in Germany. Present shortcomings are mainly...