In this paper the author relates the measurement of intangibles to the project of measuring the sources of growth. He focuses on three related and difficult areas of the measurement of national income: the measurement of new goods, the deflation of intangible investment, and the divergence...

In this paper, the authors use credit rating data from two Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. They test the banks' ability to forecast credit bureau ratings, and vice versa, and show that bank ratings are able to predict future credit bureau ratings. This is...

The computerization of retailing has made price dispersion a norm in the United States, so that any given list price or transactions price is an increasingly imperfect measure of a product's resource cost. As a consequence, measuring the real output of retailers has become increasingly...

This article presents a brief overview of the national income accounts. It summarizes the main parts of accounts and situates them within the efforts of economists to quantify economic activity and economic well-being. The author argues that these statistics are necessarily provisional and...

We provide evidence that transactions accounts help financial intermediaries monitor borrowers by offering lenders a continuous stream of data on borrowers’ account balances. This information is most readily available to commercial banks, but other intermediaries, such as finance companies,...

This paper addresses two aspects of advertising: its role in supporting entertainment and news, and its role as an investment. The author argues that in both roles advertising’s contribution to output is being undermeasured in the national income accounts. In some cases one unit of nominal...

Over the course of the 20th century, the U.S. economy has moved from rote to creativity, from a mass production workforce to a white-collar workforce whose focus is developing new products for sale. In the process, economic change has been accelerated, so that our educational process and goals...

Until the end of 1977, the U.S. consumer price index for rents tended to omit rent increases when units had a change of tenants or were vacant, biasing inflation estimates downward. Beginning in 1978, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) implemented a series of methodological changes that...

Do checking accounts help banks monitor borrowers? If they do, the rationale both for allowing regulated providers of liquidity to also make risky loans to commercial borrowers and for the government's providing deposit insurance becomes clearer. Using a unique set of data that includes monthly...

Until the end of 1977, the U.S. consumer price index for rents tended to omit rent increases when units had a change of tenants or were vacant, biasing inflation estimates downward. Beginning in 1978, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) implemented a series of methodological changes that...