This paper investigates the validity of household survey data published by Statistics South Africa since 1993 and later integrated into the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series (PALMS). A series of statistical adjustments are proposed, compared, and applied to primary data with the purpose of...

The underlying data from which the U.S. unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, and duration of unemployment are calculated contain numerous internal contradictions. This paper catalogs these inconsistencies and proposes a reconciliation. We find that the usual statistics understate...

Identification of Fed monetary policy shocks is complex, in light of the distinct policymaking regimes before, during, and after the ZLB period of December 2008 to December 2015. We develop a heteroscedasticity-based partial least squares approach, combined with Fama-MacBeth style cross-section...

The Agricultural Productivity Gap (APG) - the ratio of the average labor productivity in non-agriculture to that in agriculture - tends to be very large in developing countries and potentially represents misallocation of resources. This paper makes three contributions to the literature on APG....

We compare popular measures of transaction costs based on daily data with their high-frequency data-based counterparts. We find that for U.S. equities and major foreign exchange rates, (i) the measures based on daily data are highly upward biased and imprecise; (ii) the bias is a function of...

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...

This paper combines information from two sources of U.S. private payroll employment to increase the accuracy of real-time measurement of the labor market. The sources are the Current Employment Statistics (CES) from BLS and microdata from the payroll processing firm ADP. We briefly describe the...