The 2007 financial and economic crisis that began in the United States and quickly spread around the world differed from earlier crises in a number of significant ways. This book examines the causes of these events in the US, and their impacts on North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Although national accounts data provide the most comprehensive overview of economic activity, preliminary estimates are subject to much revision before they are regarded as reliable indicators. Oddly enough, the market acts on the preliminary estimates as though they were final and complete....

Economists have proposed several different techniques for measuring the underground economy but the literature gives only point estimates not standard errors. This makes it difficult to see if different estimates are contained in one confidence band. This paper provides an approach to estimating...

The statistical discrepancy is often used to gauge the reliability of national accounts data. Particularly since the mid-1980's the statistical discrepancy in Australia has grown significantly in size and variance. In the paper we demonstrate that the overwhelming contribution to the size of the...