In the U.S. Census Bureau's 2002 and 2007 Censuses of Manufactures 79% and 73% of observations respectively have imputed data for at least one variable used to compute total factor productivity. The Bureau primarily imputes for missing values using mean-imputation methods which can reduce the...

Within-industry differences in measured plant-level productivity are large. A large literature has been devoted to explaining the causes and consequences of these differences. In the U.S. Census Bureau's manufacturing data, the Bureau imputes for missing values using methods known to result in...

We examine two measures of monthly manufacturing production. The first is the index of industrial production; the second is constructed from the accounting identity that output equals sales plus the change in inventories. We show that the means, variances, and serial correlation coefficients of...

We develop a model for decomposing the covariance structure of panel data on firms into a part due to permanent heterogeneity, a part due to differential histories with unknown ages, and a part due to the evolution of economic shocks to the firm. Our model allows for the endogenous death of...

The paper derives a new monthly index of industrial production for the United States for 1884-1940. This index improves upon existing measures of industrial production by excluding indirect proxies of industrial activity, by only using component series that are consistent over time, and by not...

Key macro indicators such as output, productivity, and inflation are based on a complex system across multiple statistical agencies using different samples and different levels of aggregation. The Census Bureau collects nominal sales, the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects prices, and the...

Real exchange rates between the yen and dollar based on general price indexes overestimate the competitiveness of the United States relative to Japan. High productivity growth in the traded sector of the Japanese economy results in a continuous fall in the prices of traded goods relative to...

U.S. balance-of-payments problems in the 1960s remain poorly understood. In this paper I argue that they had two aspects. On the one hand there was a problem of real overvaluation, evident in the erosion of the current account and reflecting the reluctance of the Fed, the Executive and Congress...

In 2021, the Biden Administration issued mandates requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for U.S. federal employees and contractors and for some healthcare and private sector workers. Although these mandates have been subject to legal challenges and some have been halted or delayed, rigorous appraisal...

The dismal decade of 2010-19 recorded the slowest productivity growth of any decade in U.S. history, only 1.1 percent per year in the business sector. Yet the pandemic appears to have created a resurgence in productivity growth with a 4.1 percent rate achieved in the four quarters of 2020. This...