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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 ...
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.
Journal Article
Jargon alert : Sunk cost
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.
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
Working Paper
A Dummy Test of Identification in Models with Bunching
We propose a simple test of the main identification assumption in models where the treatment variable takes multiple values and has bunching. The test consists of adding an indicator of the bunching point to the estimation model and testing whether the coefficient of this indicator is zero. Although similar in spirit to the test in Caetano (2015), the dummy test has important practical advantages: it is more powerful at detecting endogeneity, and it also detects violations of the functional form assumption. The test does not require exclusion restrictions and can be implemented in many ...