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 combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution...

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...

In the past two decades the widely reported personal saving rate in the United States has dropped from double digits to below zero. First, we attempt to account for the decline in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) saving rate. The macroeconomic literature suggests that about half...

Recently, my claim that depreciation reported in the Japanese national accounts is underestimated by a substantial margin has been challenged by Dekle and Summers (NBER Working Paper No. 3690), on the ground that the implied depreciation rate (ratio of depreciation to the capital stock) is...

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 is an extensive review of chapter 16 in the System of National Accounts, 1993 written by Peter Hill. The basic principles for measuring price and quantity change in the National Accounts are explained. The paper also presents some new material on the consistency of superlative indexes...

A number of recent papers have examined the role of environmental variables in accounting for economic growth, and have concluded that net measures of national product are superior to gross measures in portraying the outcome of the growth process. This paper argues that the two measures are not...

This paper provides new estimates of depreciation rates for personal computers using an extensive database of prices of used PCs. Our results show that PCs lose roughly half their remaining value, on average, with each additional year of use. We decompose that decline into age-related...

This paper presents Robert Gallman's classic, but heretofore unpublished annual series for US national product over the 1834-59 and 1869-1909 periods. The 'Volume 30' series, reported as decadal averages, underlie much of what we know about American income growth and capital formation before...