Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose measurement error is plausibly independent of the errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...

In this paper, we try to understand whether measures of GDP per capita taken from the national accounts or measures of mean income or consumption derived from household surveys better proxy for true income per capita. We propose a data-driven method to assess the relative quality of GDP per...

The scale of the recent collapse in asset values and the magnitude of the recession suggest that activities connected to the increase in values over the 2002-07 period - notably, expansion of the financial markets, homebuilding, and real estate - were overstated. If this is true, aggregate U.S....

In this paper, we introduce the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel, a new longitudinal database with detailed information on consumer debt and credit. The panel uses a unique sample design and information derived from consumer credit reports to track individuals' and households' access to and use of...

A large body of empirical work has found that exchange rate movements have only modest effects on inflation. However, the response of an import price index to exchange rate movements may be underestimated because some import price changes are missed when constructing the index. We investigate...

This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI is a weekly composite index of real economic activity, with eight of ten series available...

This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI, with its ten component series, tracks the overall economy. Comparing the contributions of...

We analyze a model for N different measurements of a persistent latent time series when measurement errors are mean-reverting, which implies a common trend among measurements. We study the consequences of overdifferencing, finding potentially large biases in maximum likelihood estimators of the...

We exploit the information in the successive vintages of gross domestic expenditure (GDE) and gross domestic income (GDI) from the current comprehensive revision to obtain an improved, timely measure of U.S. aggregate output by exploiting cointegration between the different measures and taking...