We document the empirical properties of revisions to major macroeconomic variables in the United States. Our findings suggest that they do not satisfy simple desirable statistical properties. In particular, we find that these revisions do not have a zero mean, which indicates that the initial...

Inaccurate measures of the aggregate price level may distort short-run policy decisions and may produce misleading comparisons of productivity growth across decades and among nations. Primarily intended for non-US readers, this paper serves the dual purpose of reviewing compactly the vast US...

Comparisons of economic performance over space and time largely depend on how statistical evidence from national accounts and historical estimates are spliced. To allow for changes in relative prices, GDP benchmark years in national accounts are periodically replaced with new and more recent...

The rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in world trade has brought both benefits and anxiety to other economies. For many policy questions, it is crucial to know the extent of foreign value added (FVA) in exports. We review a general formula in Koopman, Wang and Wei (2008) for...

This Paper is an exercise in dating the euro area business cycle on a monthly basis. We construct several monthly European real GDP series, and then apply the Bry-Boschan (1971) procedure. Using this method we identify four business cycles. Studying further indicators of business activity, we...

We argue that a sensible measure of the aggregate value of human capital is the ratio of total labour income per capita to the wage of a person with zero years of schooling. The reason is that total labour income not only incorporates human capital, but also physical capital: given human...

Replication of two recent studies of growth determinants shows that results are sensitive to the choice of data from which growth rates are calculated, especially with respect to whether economic convergence has occurred. Previous warnings against using data that has been adjusted to increase...

September 2002, a new market in 'Economic Derivatives' was launched allowing traders to take positions on future values of several macroeconomic data releases. We provide an initial analysis of the prices of these options. We find that market-based measures of expectations are similar to...

We construct a set of human capital indexes for the states of the United States for each Census year starting in 1940. To do so we propose a new methodology for the construction of index numbers in panel data sets. Our method is based on an optimal approach by which we choose the `best' set...

Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and self-selection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioural relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and...