Transition in Central Europe is four years old. State firms which dominated the economy are struggling with market forces. A new private sector quickly emerged and has taken hold. Unemployment, which did not exist, is high and still increasing. Will this process of transition accelerate, or slow...

We investigate the resilience of CESEE countries during ECB monetary cycles after the entrance of ten countries to the EU in 2004. Undeniably, these countries have experienced a 'miracle' growth during the 2000s decade. However, several obstacles appeared following the global financial crisis...

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...

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...

Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries by conducting large-scale incentivized online...

How are applications to start new businesses related to aggregate economic activity? This paper explores the properties of three monthly business application series from the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Formation Statistics as economic indicators: all business applications, business...

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...

One of the pervasive issues in social and environmental research has been to improve the quality of socioeconomic data in developing countries. Because of the shortcoming of standard data sources, the present study examines luminosity (measures of nighttime lights) as a proxy for standard...

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...

Access to timely information on consumer spending is important to economic policymakers. The Census Bureau's monthly retail trade survey is a primary source for monitoring consumer spending nationally, but it is not well suited to study localized or short-lived economic shocks. Moreover, lags in...