New Data Sources in Macroeconomics

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The proposed research centers on measurement and substantive issues raised by the investigator's recently completed book, The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices, as well as by his newly released data and estimates on real GNP covering the period 1869- 1908. The primary focus will be on the low rate of productivity growth in the U.S. private economy in the 1968-84 interval. Many of the conceptual and substantive questions involving the productivity slowdown are directly related to the series on durable goods prices, particularly the role of computers and other electronic equipment in changing the quality of consumer and producer services in ways that do not enter present measures of output. In addition to exploring the implications of previously collected data, the puzzle of slow productivity growth outside of manufacturing in the U.S. will be addressed by developing new output measures for individual industries, studying the effects of different methods of measurement used in other major OECD economies, and searching for new data that may reveal changes in the quantity and quality of services. A secondary focus will be on issues raised by the historical research on GNP. While the latter provided new measures only of cyclical deviations of output from trend, not of the trend itself, it yet uncovered new data sources that will improve estimates of those trends. Also, it revealed puzzling contradictions in the measurement of real output and prices in the important period after World War I, 1919-23, which need to be addressed by primary data. Resolution of the conflict between major indicators of the depth of the 1920-21 recession is extremely important in developing an understanding of what went wrong in 1929-33. A third issue is the unsatisfactory state of price data during the period between the end of Rees' classic (1961) study and 1947, when the period covered by the durable goods book begins. The overall significance of the improvements in the historical as well as the more current indicators of economic activity is the increased capability they create for the effective analysis of the central problems of macroeconomics.