Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and corresponding targets for 2030 have been adopted by world leaders at the historic UN summit in 2015. Rankings are often constructed in order to hold countries accountable to achieve these targets. This paper illustrates the sensitivity of rankings to the choice of indicators and methodological assumptions by comparing the three most prominent methods using the sample of EU28 countries. The results of our analysis suggest that a country's relative position depends almost entirely on the chosen method and indicators.

Multiplicative interaction terms are widely used in economics to identify heterogeneous effects and to tailor policy recommendations. The execution of these models is often flawed due to specification and interpretation errors. This article introduces regression trees and regression tree ensembles to model and visualize interaction effects. Tree-based methods include interactions by construction and in a nonlinear manner. Visualizing nonlinear interaction effects in a way that can be easily read overcomes common interpretation errors. We apply the proposed approach to two different datasets to illustrate its usefulness.

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We are grateful to seminar participants in Rome and Leuven, and participants of the XXV Meeting of the Economics of Education Association, the 4th Workshop on efficiency in education, the 6th Workshop on efficiency and productivity analysis. In particular,