Federal statistical agencies in the United States and analogous agencies elsewhere commonly report official economic statistics as point estimates, without accompanying measures of error. Users of the statistics may incorrectly view them as error-free or may incorrectly conjecture error...

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.

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...

This paper presents new data on the sources of growth for the Japanese economy over the period 1960- 2000. The principal innovation is the incorporation of detailed information for individual industries, including those involved in the production of computers, communications equipment, and...

We argue that a sensible measure of the aggregate value of human capital is the ratio of total labor income per capita to the wage of a person with zero years of schooling. The reason for that is that total labor income not only incorporates human capital, but also physical capital: given human...

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....

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...

In September 2002, a new market in %u201CEconomic Derivatives%u201D was launched allowing traders to take positions on future values of several macroeconomic data releases. We provide an initial analysis of the prices of these options. We find that market-based measures of expectations are...