Economic Measurement Research Institute (Workshop Supplement)

The current system of economic statistics for the nation is under pressure because of increasing costs, declining survey response rates, and shortfalls in its ability to capture transformation driven by new technologies. The Economic Measurement Research Institute (EMRI) will support and catalyze research focused on improving official economic statistics for the country through systematic use of the data generated by the 21st century information economy. The methodologies, techniques, and tools developed by the EMRI will enable more timely, accurate and granular measures of key economic outcomes including prices, productivity, output, wages, and employment. Improvements in these statistics will benefit the planning and decision-making of business, households, and policymakers, and allow better understanding of how technological change and research and development efforts affect the economy.

The Economic Measurement Research Institute (EMRI) is a research center launched by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to initiate and support research collaborations among federal statistical agencies, the business community, and academic experts in order to advance the development of new economic measures with an emphasis on tracking the economic effects of technical change and scientific advances. The EMRI will support demonstration projects that show how the production of official economic statistics can be modernized.

In its first phase, the EMRI will support research in four areas, (1) how measurement of retail spending and inflation can be redesigned to make use of item-level transactions data to value technologically driven and other quality changes embedded in retail goods, (2) integration of administrative and American Community Survey data to produce new statistics on the gig economy, (3) use of new information on income statements of businesses to lay the groundwork for improving the measurement of intangible capital to account for investments in R&D, and (4) linking of data from the NSF Business R&D and Innovation Survey to other business data housed at the Census Bureau to generate new estimates of the contribution of R&D to productivity growth in manufacturing. The EMRI also will support two additional research projects on economic measurement based on ideas received via an open call for proposals from the community and run competitions to support five data purchase grants to encourage exploration and use of new data sources to support new or improved economic measures. EMRI will host an annual conference on the economic measurement research theme to foster constructive collaborations towards improving the nation’s economic statistics.

EMRI projects will produce cutting edge research on economic measurement and new methods for leveraging large-scale “naturally occurring data”—i.e., data created by businesses, households, non-profit institutions, and governments during the course of their normal activities—for economic measurement and analysis. This targeted research will create the knowledge and methods needed to re-engineer the existing system of official statistics so that the methods for data collection, construction, and dissemination are based on 21st century information technology to effectively measure the 21st century economy. The research will produce new methods for capturing how fundamental changes in technologies affect economic outcomes for households and businesses, and how technological change affects the structure of the economy and its overall performance.