In this essay we review the empirical literature about sovereign debt and default. As we survey the work of economists, historians, and political scientists, we also emphasize parallel developments by theorists and recommend steps to improve the correspondence between theory and data.

This paper analyzes the relationship between capital account liberalization and macroeconomic volatility using Brazil as a case study. The paper provides several stylized facts regarding the evolution of capital flows and controls in Brazil in the last three decades. We conclude that,...

We define a general class of network formation models, Statistical Exponential Random Graph Models (SERGMs), that nest standard exponential random graph models (ERGMs) as a special case. We provide the first general results on when these models' (including ERGMs) parameters estimated from the...

Social media enable promising new approaches to measuring economic activity and analyzing economic behavior at high frequency and in real time using information independent from standard survey and administrative sources. This paper uses data from Twitter to create indexes of job loss, job...

This paper examines the quality of data collected in the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey, which is the source for the Consumer Price Index weights and is the main source of U.S. consumption microdata. We compare reported spending on a large number of categories of goods and services to...

Administrative datasets provide an excellent source for detailed analysis of establishment entries and exits on a fine and disaggregate level. However, administrative datasets are not without problems: restructuring and relabeling of firms is often poorly measured and can create large biases....

The Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single firm and its employees which matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers to create a two-year panel study of a large subset of new hires. The project's most distinctive...

Research users of large administrative have to adjust their data for quirks, problems, and issues that are inevitable when working with these kinds of datasets. Not all solutions to these problems are identical, and how they differ may affect how the data is to be interpreted. Some elements of...

The Consumer Price Index does not take into account the fact that consumers alter the composition of their purchases in response to changes in relative prices. This substitution effect will cause the CPI to grow faster than the cost of living. This paper presents new estimates showing that this...

Aggregate measures of real GDP growth obtained from the GDP by Industry Accounts often differ from the featured measure of real GDP growth obtained from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs). We find that differences in source data account for most of the difference in aggregate real...