We develop and analyze a new system of disaggregated economic accounts. The system breaks down national accounting positions into bilateral flows among consistently defined subgroups of consumers ("consumer cells"), subgroups of producers ("producer cells"), the government, and the rest of the...

Economic growth is typically measured in per capita terms. But social welfare should arguably include the number of people as well as their standard of living. We decompose social welfare growth -- measured in consumption-equivalent (CE) units -- into contributions from rising population and...

We propose a model that starts from the premise that intangible capital needs to be stored on some medium --- software, patents, essential employees --- before it can be utilized in production. Storage implies that intangible capital may be partially non-rival within the firm, leading to scale...

Integrating national accounting with financial accounting, we provide firm-specific estimates of current-cost capital stocks for the entire Compustat universe, as well as an array of estimates of investment flows, economic depreciation rates, and capital and investment price deflators. The...

The paper examines the official Commerce Department estimates of gross national product for 1909-1928 and finds that they are far inferior to the less commonly used Kendrick GNP estimates. The paper then derives a revised version of the Kendrick series that alters significantly the...

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 studies budgetary, financial and monetary policy evaluationand design using a comprehensive wealth or permanent income accounting framework. A set of stylized balance sheets and permanent income accountsis constructed for the public, private and overseas sectors.These are then...

China's national accounts are based on data collected by local governments. However, since local governments are rewarded for meeting growth and investment targets, they have an incentive to skew local statistics. China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) adjusts the data provided by local...

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...