Search Results
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 ...
Working Paper
Achievement Gap Estimates and Deviations from Cardinal Comparability
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 constructs worst-case bounds for the bias in the estimated achievement gap (or achievement gap change) that could result from using the observed rather than the true test scale, given that the true and observed scales are no more than a fixed distance from each other. The worst-case weighting functions have ...
Journal Article
Economic history : Monetary policy in the Confederacy
Discussion Paper
Updating the Distributional Financial Accounts
In addition to incorporating 2020q2 data from the Financial Accounts, the 2020q2 release of the Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs) includes three substantial updates. The most consequential is the incorporation of the newly released 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF).
Journal Article
Research spotlight : The economics of happiness
Discussion Paper
How Do Children Spend Their Time? Time Use and Skill Development in the PSID
As income and wealth inequality have grown in the United States in recent decades, the large and growing differences in household expenditures on children from advantaged versus disadvantaged backgrounds have increasingly become a matter of public concern. High socioeconomic status (SES) households (those with high incomes and/or high levels of parental education) increasingly spend more money on physical goods (books, tuition, computers, etc.) and more time on "enrichment" activities such as homework, tutoring, reading, and extracurricular activities that are thought to directly foster ...