Traditional methods of collecting data from businesses and households face increasing challenges. These include declining response rates to surveys, increasing costs to traditional modes of data collection, and the difficulty of keeping pace with rapid changes in the economy. The digitization of...

During the early years of its existence, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) assembled an extensive data set on all aspects of the pre-WWII macroeconomy. Until 1978, this data set existed only on the handwritten sheets to which the early NBER researchers copied the data from original...

We describe the theory and practice of real GDP comparisons across countries and over time. Effective with version 8, the Penn World Table (PWT) will be taken over by the University of California, Davis and the University of Groningen, with continued input from Alan Heston at the University of...

The new trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements ("learning"). We use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized manufacturing sector...

We build up from the plant level an "aggregate(d)" Solow residual by estimating every U.S. manufacturing plant's contribution to the change in aggregate final demand between 1976 and 1996. Our framework uses the Petrin and Levinsohn (2010) definition of aggregate productivity growth, which...

We develop a dynamic multi-country general equilibrium model to investigate forces acting on the global economy during the Great Recession and ensuing recovery. Our multi-sector framework accounts completely for countries' trade, investment, production, and GDPs in terms of different sets of...

Recent studies of late nineteenth century labor market integration have found that despite high rates of geographic mobility relatively large inter- and intra-regional differentials in real wages persisted with little tendency toward convergence. These results point to the absence of a unified...

This paper uses a rich panel dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms (1990-2006) and a propensity score reweighting estimator to show that multinational firms acquire the most productive domestic firms, which, on acquisition, conduct more product and process innovation (simultaneously adopting...

Economists have often argued that "pay for performance" is the optimal compensation scheme. However, use of the simplest form of pay for performance, the piece rate, has been in decline in manufacturing in recent decades. We show both theoretically and empirically that these changes are due to...

This paper studies dynamic labor demand by private and public manufacturing plants in China. It contributes along two dimensions. First, it uncovers the objectives of public enterprises and compares them to private enterprises. Second, it estimates adjustment costs of these plants and thus their...