Reference: Challenge, January/February, 1979

A proposal for maintaining privacy protection in large data bases by the use of partially aggregated data instead of the original individual data. Proper micro aggregation techniques can serve to protect the confidential nature of the individual data with minimumal information loss....

Prais (1958) showed that the standard CPI computed by most statistical agencies can be interpreted as a weighted average of household price indexes, where the weight of each household is determined by its total expenditures. In this paper, we analytically decompose the difference between the...

This paper provides the details of the construction of new quarterly measures of the real GDPs of the 36 U.S. trading partners that are taken into consideration by the Federal Reserve in its "broad exchange rate" indexes. These new measures have some important advantages. First, they allow the...

Using data from the Business Surveys Unit of the European Commission, this paper examines how, and how accurately, people assess economic systems. As expected, respondents demonstrate to know their own situation better than the system wide one, and the past better than the future. Also,...

I estimate time varying aggregate capital stock depreciation rates for the post-war U.S. economy using capital-investment evolution equation along with the data on the annual net capital stock and corresponding quarterly gross investment series. I estimate depreciation rates of consumer durable...

This work is focused on identifying the relationship an economic system and its policies have with the environment. The biosphere is chosen in particular as object of analysis but this can be extended by means of an ecosystem recursive properties. The common factor involved in the relationship...

The rapidly changing environment of the transition may create special problems for calculation of index numbers that require a fixed basket of goods and retail outlets. Using referent-level data we find that fixed- weight Laspeyres index on average overstated cost of living increases by...

Although linearly interpolated series are often used in economics, little has been done to examine the effects of interpolation on time series properties and on statistical inference. We show that linear interpolation of a trend tationary series superimposes a ‘periodic’ structure on the...