This paper assesses the sensitivity of standard empirical methods for measuring group differences in achievement to violations in the cardinal comparability of achievement test scores. The paper defines a distance measure over possible weighting functions (scalings) of test scores. It then...

This article reviews recent developments in the econometrics of early childhood human capital and investments. We start with a discussion about the lack of cardinality in test scores, the reasons it matters for empirical research on human capital, and the approaches researchers have used to...

This paper discusses various methods for assessing group differences in academic achievement using only the ordinal content of achievement test scores. Researchers and policymakers frequently draw conclusions about achievement differences between various populations using methods that rely on...

Males have greater variability in achievement than females in almost all countries using internationally comparable test scores. However, these variance comparisons can frequently be reversed using economically plausible, order-preserving rescalings of the psychometrically derived test scores....

We construct a new measure of aggregate U.S. housing wealth based on Zillow’s Automated Valuation Model (AVM). AVMs offer advantages over other methods because they are based on recent market transaction prices, utilize large datasets which include property characteristics and local...

This paper describes the construction of the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs), a new dataset containing quarterly estimates of the distribution of U.S. household wealth since 1989, and provides the first look at the resulting data. The DFAs build on two existing Federal Reserve Board...