Object
Hindsight Contamination Rate
Share of observations in a historical evaluation that were not actually available at the claimed cutoff.
Research architecture · five programmes
Research built around evidence that can survive a changing measurement system.
The Lab’s projects are organized around five recurring research programmes. Measurement economics connects them: release timing, vintages, definitions, methodology changes, physical evidence and uncertainty are treated as part of the empirical object rather than metadata added at the end.
01Real-Time Macroeconomic MeasurementWhat was knowable, when, and in which vintage?02Alternative Economic MeasurementWhat do physical and high-frequency signals say?03Firm DynamicsHow do firms enter, hire, adapt and survive?04State and MarketsHow does state capital alter firms and markets?05Statistical IntegrityWhich claims survive definition and method changes?
Programme 01
Real-Time Macroeconomic Measurement
Reconstruct the information set that actually existed at a historical date, preserve official vintages, quantify revisions and evaluate forecasts without revised-data leakage.
Object
Revision uncertainty
Empirical first-to-later revision distributions and ranking uncertainty instead of treating first estimates as final.
Programme 02
Alternative Economic Measurement
Use physical and high-frequency signals as independent noisy measurements of latent activity, then study disagreement with official first releases rather than automatically calling one side wrong.
Latent activity stateOfficial–physical divergenceMeasurement dispersion
Research direction. Test whether high dispersion across measurement systems predicts larger subsequent official revisions. If it does, alternative data becomes a predictor of measurement uncertainty, not just another GDP forecast.
Programme 03
Firm Dynamics
Build source-bounded observable firm panels and probabilistic activity states to study hiring, technology adoption, procurement and survival without pretending public evidence equals a census.
Programme 04
State and Markets
Map procurement, SOEs, sovereign capital and industrial-policy interventions, then use dated policy and contract shocks to ask causal questions where the identification supports them.
Programme 05
Statistical Integrity
What did an indicator mean when it was released, how has the measurement system changed, and which economic claims survive those changes?
Object
Narrative fragility
Test whether rankings, thresholds, trends and public claims remain true across statistical vintages and methodology regimes.
Standard
Hostile specification
Every material empirical conclusion should survive at least one deliberately hostile but defensible specification before publication.
Research programmes5Canonical architecture.
Core measurement assets3Vintage Vault · MENA-CAL · Methodology Shock Registry
Real-time system1MENA-RTD
Research rule1+Hostile but defensible specification per material conclusion.