Until the end of 1977, the U.S. consumer price index for rents tended to omit rent increases when units had a change of tenants or were vacant, biasing inflation estimates downward. Beginning in 1978, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) implemented a series of methodological changes that...

The information revolution currently underway has changed the economy in ways that are hard to measure using conventional GDP procedures. The information available to consumers has increased dramatically as a result of the Internet and its applications, and new mobile communication devices have...

This article presents a brief overview of the national income accounts. It summarizes the main parts of accounts and situates them within the efforts of economists to quantify economic activity and economic well-being. The author argues that these statistics are necessarily provisional and...

We provide evidence that transactions accounts help financial intermediaries monitor borrowers by offering lenders a continuous stream of data on borrowers' account balances. This information is most readily available to commercial banks, but other intermediaries, such as finance companies, also...

In this paper I focus on three related and difficult areas of the measurement of national income. I argue that the economic theory underlying measurement of these items is currently controversial and incomplete