This paper introduces new estimates of recent productivity developments in the United States, using an appropriate theoretical framework for aggregating industry MFP to sectors and the total economy. Our work sheds light on the sources of the continued strong performance of U.S. productivity...

Access to timely information on consumer spending is important to economic policymakers. The Census Bureau's monthly retail trade survey is a primary source for monitoring consumer spending nationally, but it is not well suited to study localized or short-lived economic shocks. Moreover, lags in...

Severe weather events, such as blizzards and hurricanes, can temporarily disrupt economic activity. The imprints of these events on aggregate statistics can make it challenging for macroeconomists to analyze and forecast economic conditions. As one illustration, the minutes from March FOMC...

Many households face large, high-frequency changes in income and have limited financial buffers to smooth their consumption through this income volatility. However, few studies have quantified spending responses to such timing shifts in income due to a lack of high-frequency spending data. We...

This paper uses NLSY data from 1979-1993 to estimate training's effect on one year wage growth. Year-by-year training histories are constructed which allow the returns to training received at both current and previous employers to vary over time. The time patterns of the returns to training are...

Severe weather events, such as blizzards and hurricanes, can temporarily disrupt economic activity. The imprints of these events on aggregate statistics can make it challenging for macroeconomists to analyze and forecast economic conditions

The rapid growth of offshoring has sparked a contentious debate over its impact on the U.S. manufacturing sector, which has recorded steep employment declines yet strong output growth -- a fact reconciled by the notable gains in manufacturing productivity. We maintain, however, that the dramatic...

In this paper, we decompose aggregate labor productivity growth in order to gauge the relative importance of multinational corporations (MNCs) to the economic performance of the United States in the 1990s. As we define it, the MNC sector refers to the U.S. activities of multinational...