Social capital has proven to be a useful concept, but has been ill-defined and not well-measured in the economics literature. We propose a different empirical method for measuring social capital, latent class analysis, based on the idea that social capital is an unobservable multidimensional...

Das Buch widmet sich der probabilistischen Testtheorie, die ihren Ursprung in der Psychologie hat. Im Gegensatz zur klasischen Testtheorie, die im wesentlichen auf der Varianzanalyse, Regressionsanalyse und Korrelationsrechnung basiert und die von quantativen Daten ausgeht, geht man bei der...

Hurdle and zero-in ated models are the two foremost methods used to deal with excess zeros. However, their reliance on the nonparticipation assumption is a drawback when applied to recreation demand analysis because there is not a theoretical framework convincingly explaining presence of...

Economic models often depend on quantities that are unobservable, either for privacy reasons or because they are difficult to measure. Examples of such variables include human capital (or ability), personal income, unobserved heterogeneity (such as consumer "types"), etc. This situation has...

Recently, researchers have reformulated Item Response Theory (IRT) models into multilevel models to evaluate clustered data appropriately. Using a multilevel model to obtain item difficulty and person ability parameter estimates that correspond directly with IRT models’ parameters is often...

Item Response Theory (IRT) models are the basis of modern educational measurement. In order to increase testing efficiency, modern tests make ample use of groups of questions associated with a single stimulus (testlets). This violates the IRT assumption of local independence. However, a set of...

The ability to work with graphs is at the core of the economic domain and is also one of the central challenges for novices in the field. To accurately assess the graph competence of higher education students, we developed and tested an 18-item graph competence instrument with different...