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Author:Nielsen, Eric R. 

Working Paper
Test Questions, Economic Outcomes, and Inequality

Standard achievement scales aggregate test questions without considering their relationship to economic outcomes. This paper uses question-level data to improve the measurement of achievement in two ways. First, the paper constructs alternative achievement scales by relating individual questions directly to school completion and labor market outcomes. Second, the paper leverages the question data to construct multiple such scales in order to correct for biases stemming from measurement error. These new achievement scales rank students differently than standard scales and typically yield ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2019-013

Journal Article
Research spotlight : The economics of happiness

Econ Focus , Volume 8 , Issue Fall , Pages 7

Working Paper
Introducing the Distributional Financial Accounts of the United States

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 statistical products --- quarterly aggregate measures of household wealth from the Financial Accounts of the United States and triennial wealth distribution measures from the Survey of Consumer Finances --- to incorporate distributional information into a national accounting framework. The DFAs complement ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2019-017

Discussion Paper
How Can We Measure the Value of a Home? Comparing Model-Based Estimates with Owner-Occupant Estimates

In this note, we assess whether AVM estimates or owner valuations are better at approximating the market value of a home.
FEDS Notes , Paper 2018-10-11

Working Paper
The Income-Achievement Gap and Adult Outcome Inequality

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 the cardinal comparability of test scores. This paper shows that such methods can lead to erroneous conclusions in an important application: measuring changes over time in the achievement gap between youth from high- and low-income households. Commonly-employed, cardinal methods suggest that this ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2015-41

Journal Article
Jargon alert : Zero-sum game

Econ Focus , Volume 9 , Issue Spr , Pages 6

Working Paper
Measuring Aggregate Housing Wealth : New Insights from an Automated Valuation Model

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 geographic variables, and are updated frequently with little lag. However, using Zillow's AVM to measure aggregate housing wealth requires overcoming several challenges related to the representativeness of the Zillow sample. We propose methods that address these challenges and generate a new estimate of aggregate ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2018-064

Journal Article
Jargon alert : Deadweight loss

Econ Focus , Volume 9 , Issue Fall , Pages 9

Working Paper
Should Children Do More Enrichment Activities? Leveraging Bunching to Correct for Endogeneity

We study the effects of enrichment activities such as reading, homework, and extracurricular lessons on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We take into consideration that children forgo alternative activities, such as play and socializing, in order to spend time on enrichment. Our study controls for selection on unobservables using a novel approach which leverages the fact that many children spend zero hours per week on enrichment activities. At zero enrichment, confounders vary but enrichment does not, which gives us direct information about the effect of confounders on skills. ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2020-036

Working Paper
Correcting for Endogeneity in Models with Bunching

We show that in models with endogeneity, bunching at the lower or upper boundary of the distribution of the treatment variable may be used to build a correction for endogeneity. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the parameters of the corrected model, provide an estimator of the standard errors, and prove the consistency of the bootstrap. An empirical application reveals that time spent watching television, corrected for endogeneity, has roughly no net effect on cognitive skills and a significant negative net effect on non-cognitive skills in children.
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2020-080

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