New evidence is provided to assess the recent controversy regarding the volatility of real economic activity before 1929 relative to the period since World War II. Some recent work claims that the longstanding stylized fact of greater prewar volatility is "spurious". In contrast, this paper...

The paper studies budgetary, financial and monetary policy evaluationand design using a comprehensive wealth or permanent income accounting framework. A set of stylized balance sheets and permanent income accountsis constructed for the public, private and overseas sectors.These are then...

China's national accounts are based on data collected by local governments. However, since local governments are rewarded for meeting growth and investment targets, they have an incentive to skew local statistics. China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) adjusts the data provided by local...

In the 2018 comprehensive update of the national income and product accounts, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released not seasonally adjusted data, and modified its seasonal adjustment procedures. I find some indication of residual seasonality in the seasonally adjusted data as published before...

Estimating medical care productivity is a central economic challenge. This paper develops a satellite account for the US health sector that appropriately measures health care productivity and applies that to the elderly population between 1999 and 2012. The central output of the satellite...

A persistent issue in environmental economics is whether growth is sustainable. Pollution is a key driver of sustainability, which we define as an economy exhibiting falling pollution damages at its balanced growth path. We deduct air pollution and carbon dioxide damages from the national...

Infrastructure provides critical support for economic activity, and assessing its role requires reliable measures. This paper provides an overview of U.S. infrastructure data in the National Economic Accounts. After developing definitions of basic, social, and digital infrastructure, we assess...

The initial implementation of the System of National Accounts (1993) for the United States by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Federal Reserve Board has two significant advantages for economists. First, the SNA are organized according to sectors of the economy defined by economic agents:...

PPP-based national accounts have become an important part of the database for macroeconomists, development economists, and economic historians. Frequently used global data come from the Penn World Table (PWT) and the World Bank's World Development Indicators; a substantial fraction of the world...