Papers

Trade costs have fallen surprisingly little given the large increase in international trade in the last 50 years. This paper examines whether trade costs are properly measured. I show theoretically that trade weighted measures will underestimate the changes in trade costs when there are fixed… Read more

This paper presents measures of the human capital stock and of investment in human capital for the United States between 1994 and 2006. When both market and non-market production are included, the stock of human capital was equal to about three quarters of a quadrillion dollars in 2006, of which… Read more

A parsimonious theoretical model of second degree price discrimination suggests that the business cycle will affect the degree to which firms are able to price discriminate between different consumer types. We analyze price dispersion in the airline industry to assess how price discrimination… Read more

Manufacturing and vertical specialization (VS) trade, trade in goods that incorporate imported inputs, has grown rapidly since the 1960s. I argue that declining trade costs are an important explanation for these facts. I present a three stage vertical specialization trade model, with raw… Read more

The United States possesses some of the most highly developed sets of gross domestic product (GDP) accounts in the world. These accounts—which are collectively know as the national income product and wealth accounts or national accounts—have been regularly updated over the years and have well… Read more

Supplemental Materials:

• Tables (XLS)

Foreign trade enables a nation to consume a different mix of goods and services than it produces, so to measure real gross domestic income (GDI) for an open economy, we must deflate by an index of the prices of the things that this income is used to buy, not the price index for GDP. The… Read more

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) publishes annual statistics of state disposable personal income, the difference between state personal income and state personal current taxes. BEA also publishes annual statistics of personal income for sub-state areas, but BEA does not publish… Read more

This paper uses GDP-by-state and industry data, and looks at the decline in volatility of the U.S. economy that occurred in about 1984. It finds that this decline primarily results from declines in covariances between industries, or between states, rather than declines in variances of the… Read more