Measuring the Unmeasurable? Systematic Evidence on Scale Transformations in Subjective Survey Data (opens in new tab)

Ordered response scales are ubiquitous in economics, but their interpretation rests on an untested assumption: that numerical labels reflect equal psychological intervals. We develop a framework to quantify how relaxing this assumption affects empirical results. Using new experimental evidence, we show that scale use is only mildly non-linear. Replicating over 40,000 estimates from more than 80 papers, we find that coefficient signs and sign...