Papers

This paper demonstrates that the measured wealth stock of the United States increases by $2 trillion in 2022 when radio spectra are included on the balance sheet. Furthermore, this paper also demonstrates that tracking radio spectra can impact the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs)… Read more

Medical innovation is a key driver of cost growth and improved life expectancy, but measuring the welfare contribution of innovations is challenging. We leverage thousands of medical studies to estimate the quality of treatments for 13 health conditions and combine these estimates with insurance… Read more

There is a general consensus that the bias associated with the entry of new merchants has nontrivial implications for measuring inflation. However, quantifying the bias empirically has proven difficult in part because little is known about how much of the price differences in goods sold by new… Read more

Inequality statistics are usually calculated from high-quality, comprehensive survey or administrative microdata. Naturally, this data is typically available with a lag of at least 9 months from the reference period. In turbulent times, there is interest in knowing the distributional impacts of… Read more

This paper studies chained price indexes for goods in high-tech sectors, how they handle quality change and whether they will likely suffer from chain drift issues. We argue that chained indexes do not handle quality change properly; though the underlying bilateral indexes hold quality constant… Read more

Big data offers potentially enormous benefits for improving economic measurement, but it also presents challenges (e.g., lack of representativeness and instability), implying that their value is not always clear. We propose a framework for quantifying the usefulness of these data sources for… Read more

Taxes and subsidies drive a wedge between prices received and paid by producers and those paid by purchasers. Motivated by the large economic subsidies that were part of the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper introduces a new treatment for taxes and subsidies into the BEA-BLS… Read more

We apply the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method used in the labor literature to split changes in average prices into inflation and quality components. The inflation measure is a full imputation Törnqvist price index. Using this index to deflate nominal spending properly allocates changes in the… Read more

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis has undertaken a series of studies that present methods for quantifying the value of simple data that can be differentiated from the complex data created by highly skilled workers that was studied in… Read more

The monetary costs of weather and climate disasters in the U.S. grew rapidly from 1980 to 2022, rising more than five percent in real terms annually, and implying a faster depreciation of real assets. We argue that the expected depreciation from these events could be included in consumption of… Read more