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The paper estimates an index of coincident economic indicators for the US economy by using time series with different frequencies of observation (monthly and quarterly, possibly with missing values). The model that is considered is the dynamic factor model that was proposed by Stock and Watson, specified in the logarithms of the original variables and at the monthly frequency, which poses a problem of temporal aggregation with a non-linear observational constraint when quarterly time series are included. Our main methodological contribution is to provide an exact solution to this problem that hinges on conditional mode estimation by iteration of the extended Kalman filtering and smoothing equations. On the empirical side the contribution of the paper is to provide monthly estimates of quarterly indicators, among which is the gross domestic product, that are consistent with the quarterly totals. Two applications are considered: the first dealing with the construction of a coincident index for the US economy, whereas the second does the same with reference to the euro area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. construction industry accounts for approximately 4% of the gross domestic product. Although quantifying and analyzing the cumulative ecological resource consumption of the construction industry is of great importance, it has not been studied sufficiently. This paper aims to account for the total ecological resource consumption of the construction industry, including its supply chains. This analysis is achieved by using an ecologically based life-cycle assessment model. The impacts on the ecosystem were calculated on the basis of the economic data in terms of cumulative mass, energy, industrial exergy, and ecological exergy. U.S. construction sectors are holistically evaluated by using various sustainability metrics, such as resource intensity, efficiency ratio, and loading ratio. Total ecological exergy values were generally found to be larger for the sectors with higher economic output values. Heavy construction industry sectors, including construction and maintenance of highways, bridges, or pipelines, were generally found to use fewer renewable resources and to have higher emission intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating the effects of government debt and deficits on Treasury yields is complicated by the need to isolate the effects of fiscal policy from other influences. To control for the effects of the business cycle, and associated monetary policy actions, on debt, deficits, and interest rates, this paper studies the relationship between long-horizon forward rates and future federal government deficits and debt as projected by the Congressional Budget Office. For the entire 30-year sample for which these projections are available, the estimated effects of government deficits and debt on interest rates are statistically significant and economically relevant: about 25 basis points per percentage point increase in the projected deficit/GDP ratio, and 3 to 4 basis points for the debt/GDP ratio. Under plausible assumptions the parameter estimates are shown to be consistent with predictions from the neoclassical growth model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents evidence of a non-linear relationship between real GDP growth and oil price changes for the US economy. We also argue that this non-linearity is not merely due to the use of data from the mid-1980s onwards, as most authors, so far, seem to believe. In fact, we find the existence of non-linearity with the use of data earlier than 1984, and even before 1977. Furthermore, we question that the non-linear transformations of oil prices proposed in the literature are the most appropriate ones for reflecting such non-linearity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on authors James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson's article about the decline in the cyclical volatility of real economic activity in the U.S. Volatility of real gross domestic product; Role of persistence in determining the relation between the length of the difference and volatility; Changes in persistence parameter.

Comments on authors James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson's article about the decline in the cyclical volatility of real economic activity in the U.S. Two decompositions of gross domestic product growth; Importance of changes in output-gap volatility; Measure of aggregate inefficiency.

In this paper, the authors document a structural break in the volatility of U.S. GDP growth in the first quarter of 1984. As a means of understanding this dramatic reduction in volatility, the authors decompose output growth by major product type and provide evidence that the aggregate volatility break emanates from a reduction in the volatility of durable goods production. The authors show that the break in durables is roughly coincident with a break in the proportion of durables output accounted for by inventories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key feature of endogenous growth models is that they imply that permanent changes in government policy can have permanent effects on growth rates. In this paper we develop and implement an empirical framework to test this implication. In a regression of growth rates on current and lagged policy variables the sum of the slope coefficients for each policy variable should be nonzero (zero) for endogenous (exogenous) growth models. In our estimation we use time series data spanning up to 100 years for the United States and 160 years for the United Kingdom. We find that the implication for exogenous growth is usually rejected when both a tax variable and a public capital variable are included in the regression; failing to include both variables biases the results in favor of exogenous growth models. Our findings show that it is possible to have endogenous growth even when U.S. and U.K. GDP growth rates appear to be stable over time. We conclude that at the aggregate level, the production function appears to exhibit constant returns to scale in reproducible inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the sustainability of large current account deficits in the balance of payments of the U.S. It is estimated that in 2001, the U.S. current account deficit will reach $450 billion or 4.4 percent of gross domestic product, up from 3.6 percent in 1999. Current account balance was last achieved in 1991. It is useful to put the U.S. deficit into the global context of foreign trade. But globally the numbers do not add up. In principle, the world should be in current account balance every period. In fact, the records show a deficit of $130 billion for 1999, suggesting substantial underrecording of receipts. Thus the recorded deficit is undoubtedly exaggerated, perhaps by tens of billions of dollars. Even this correction, however, would still leave a U.S. deficit that is large by twentieth-century standards, and a dominating feature of the world economy in recent years. It is often suggested that the large current account deficit poses a serious financing problem for the U.S. In economic terms it is more nearly correct to say that net capital inflows cause the current account deficit. The basic story of the past two decades is that, on balance, foreigners have wanted to buy more U.S. assets than what the U.S. have wanted to invest abroad. The language of current account deficits is unfortunate. It reverses the economic logic and suggests that in the U.S. case a deficit is undesirable, even though it reflects a vote of confidence by the rest of the world in the U.S.

This paper assesses the impact of a monetary policy shock on the U.S. economy. Our measures of contractionary monetary policy shocks are associated with (i) a fall in various monetary aggregates and a rise in the federal funds rate, (ii) declines in different measures of real activity, (iii) sharp declines in commodity prices and a delayed decline in the GDP price deflator. In addition, net funds raised by the business sector increases for roughly a year, after which it falls. Finally, we find that households do not adjust their financial assets and liabilities for several quarters after a monetary shock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the cyclical volatility of real economic activity in the U.S. Volatility of real gross domestic product; Reduction in the volatility of inflation; Drift in the regression coefficients.

We study the conditional distribution of GDP growth as a function of economic and financial conditions. Deteriorating financial conditions are associated with an increase in the conditional volatility and a decline in the conditional mean of GDP growth, leading the lower quantiles of GDP growth to vary with financial conditions and the upper quantiles to be stable over time. Upside risks to GDP growth are low in most periods while downside risks increase as financial conditions become tighter. We argue that amplification mechanisms in the financial sector generate the observed growth vulnerability dynamics. (JEL C53, E23, E27, E32, E44) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States has been experiencing a slowdown in measured labor productivity growth since 2004. A number of commentators and researchers have suggested that this slowdown is at least in part illusory because real output data have failed to capture the new and better products of the past decade. I conduct four disparate analyses, each of which offers empirical challenges to this 'mismeasurement hypothesis.' First, the productivity slowdown has occurred in dozens of countries, and its size is unrelated to measures of the countries' consumption or production intensities of information and communication technologies (ICTs, the type of goods most often cited as sources of mismeasurement). Second, estimates from the existing research literature of the surplus created by internet-linked digital technologies fall far short of the $3 trillion or more of 'missing output' resulting from the productivity growth slowdown. Third, if measurement problems were to account for even a modest share of this missing output, the properly measured output and productivity growth rates of industries that produce and service ICTs would have to have been multiples of their measured growth in the data. Fourth, while measured gross domestic income has been on average higher than measured gross domestic product since 2004-perhaps indicating workers are being paid to make products that are given away for free or at highly discounted prices-this trend actually began before the productivity slowdown and moreover reflects unusually high capital income rather than labor income (i.e., profits are unusually high). In combination, these complementary facets of evidence suggest that the reasonable prima facie case for the mismeasurement hypothesis faces real hurdles when confronted with the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charitable giving has continued to increase in economic importance in the developed world. For instance, in the United States, more than $335 billion--over 2 per cent of US GDP, was contributed to philanthropic organizations in 2013 alone. According to the World Giving Index, around 50-60 per cent of households in the developed world give to charity. The supply of charitable dollars is met by a high demand--billions are spent on fundraising activities annually. Field experiments have allowed us to learn about the different motivations of potential donors, as well as to identify the best strategies that non-profit organizations can use to attract funds. In this article, we discuss the work in this field to date. Then we suggest using selection into 'the ask' as a promising new direction for future research. We discuss strategies that charities can use in practice to take advantage of new research findings. Finally, we complement our discussion by presenting new evidence on giving behaviour in a door-to-door field experiment we conducted with over 1,000 households in a mid-sized city in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real GDP growth is projected to average 2.4 percent annually over the next decade, near its previous 10-year trend of 2.5 percent, while productivity growth is expected to slow; an increased personal savings rate, slower growth in personal consumption expenditures, rising medical expenses, and the continuation of the trade deficit also will characterize the coming decade [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses a state-space model to estimate the "true" unobserved measure of total output in the U.S. economy. The analysis uses the entire history (i.e., all vintages) of selected real-time data series to compute revisions and corresponding statistics for those series. The revision statistics, along with the most recent data vintage, are used in a state-space model to extract filtered estimates of the "true" series. Under certain assumptions, Monte Carlo simulations suggest this framework can improve published estimates by as much as 30 percent, lasting an average of 11 periods. Realtime experiments using a measure of real gross domestic product show improvement closer to 10 percent, lasting for 1 to 2 quarters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using improved estimates of world and country GDPs, population, and GDP per capita published by Angus Maddison (2001), we report findings of a quantitative study of the trajectory of the United States in world historical perspective. We compare the U.S. economic hegemony of the twentieth century with the seventeenth-century Dutch hegemony and the British hegemony of the nineteenth century. We also track the trajectories of challengers and discuss the future of hegemonic rivalry and global governance. Our findings support the existence of a sequence of hegemonic rises and declines. Despite a recent plateau in the decline of U.S. economic hegemony, we contend that the United States will continue to decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the assumptions used in developing economic projections, real GDP is expected to grow during the next decade, while productivity remains strong and inflation remains stable [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the subpar performance of the U.S. economy in the first half of 2003. Increase in the real gross domestic product in the first half of the year; Prices of equities; Expectation of the Federal Researve on the economic activity.

Investigates the decline in the cyclical volatility of real economic activity in the U.S. Form of productivity and commodity price shocks; Annual growth rates of gross domestic product; Description of time-varying time-series process; Implications for recessions and expansions.

Details the projections of the United States economy by 2010. Gross domestic product expected from 2001 to 2010; Examination on the key economic indicators of the country; Statistics on the country's economic performance from 1990 to 2000.

Forecasts the economic conditions in the United States to year 2008. Amount of its gross domestic product; Status of its corporate downsizing and restructuring in the nineteen nineties; Cost of its Federal deficit in 1991.

Abstract--We hope to answer three questions: Has there been a structural break in postwar U.S. real GDP growth towards stabilization? If so, when? What is the nature of this structural break? We employ a Bayesian approach to identify a structural break at an unknown changepoint in a Markov-switching model of the business cycle. Empirical results suggest a break in GDP growth toward stabilization, with the posterior mode of the break date at 1984:1. Furthermore, we find a narrowing gap between growth rates during recessions and booms that is at least as important as any decline in the volatility of shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the book "Business Statistics of the United States: 1996," edited by Courtenay M. Slater. The book contains annual time series data for the U.S. economy for 1967 through 1995 and monthly data for 1992 through 1995. Part 1 covers the U.S. economy as a whole, providing data on gross domestic product and cyclical indicators consumer income and spending industrial production and capacity utilization. Part 2 provides industry profiles, presenting data by major industry group, following the structure of the Standard Industrial Classification.