Federal statistical agencies in the United States and analogous agencies elsewhere commonly report official economic statistics as point estimates, without accompanying measures of error. Users of the statistics may incorrectly view them as error-free or may incorrectly conjecture error...

In this essay we review the empirical literature about sovereign debt and default. As we survey the work of economists, historians, and political scientists, we also emphasize parallel developments by theorists and recommend steps to improve the correspondence between theory and data.

Social media enable promising new approaches to measuring economic activity and analyzing economic behavior at high frequency and in real time using information independent from standard survey and administrative sources. This paper uses data from Twitter to create indexes of job loss, job...

In September 2002, a new market in %u201CEconomic Derivatives%u201D 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...

A number of analysts have claimed recently that the consumer price index overstates the annual increase in the cost of living. This paper develops a framework for studying measurement problems in the consumer price index and systematically analyzes the available evidence concerning the magnitude...

This paper summarizes the characteristics of the System of National Accounts as outlined in SNA93. It outlines the elements of infrastructure used to build the accounts and then describes the flow of accounts and supply and use framework used to construct integrated macro economic statistics....

This paper develops a set of approximate band-pass filters designed for use in a wide range of economic applications. In particular, we design and implement a specific band-pass filter which isolates business-cycle fluctuations in macroeconomic time series. This filter was designed to isolate...

A review of the Japanese National Accounts reveals that the Japanese household sector has apparently suffered a capital loss of some 400 trillion-yen in 1990 consumption prices since 1970. This loss is large enough to explain most of the Japanese recession of the 1990's. We can trace some...

I count the number of times per month that the word `shortage' appears on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for the period 1969-1994. Using this as a general measure of shortages in the US economy, I test whether shortages help predict inflation. Using a variety of...

We develop and implement a method to improve estimates of worker flows and job openings based on the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS). Our method involves reweighting the cross-sectional density of employment growth rates in JOLTS to match the corresponding density in the...