Chapter 1
Empirical analysis of the US consumer
fact, fiction, and the future
Abstract
The term “streetlight effect” is used to describe an observational bias in research, given the tension that often exists between the observational demands of a research question and the measurements at hand to answer it. The fact that direct experiments are relatively uncommon in economics is a reflection of this tension. One might argue further that US consumption, with few detailed data sources compared to economic variables like employment and income, is particularly ...
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