Concerns about the quality of China's official GDP statistics have been a perennial question in understanding its economic dynamics. We use data on satellite-recorded nighttime lights as an independent benchmark for comparing various published indicators of the state of the Chinese economy....

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

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...

Concerns about the quality of China's official GDP statistics have been a perennial question in understanding its economic dynamics. We use data on satellite-recorded nighttime lights as an independent benchmark for comparing various published indicators of the state of the Chinese economy....

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

Increases in real U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) averaged an annual rate of 3.2 percent between the fourth quarters of 1992 and 1995 (the solid line in panel A of figure 1), a relatively slow pace of growth considering that the economy was emerging from the 1990-91 recession. Output then...

Increases in real U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) averaged an annual rate of 3.2 percent between the fourth quarters of 1992 and 1995 (the solid line in panel A of figure 1), a relatively slow pace of growth considering that the economy was emerging from the 1990-91 recession. Output then...