Economic Measurement Seminar - Content Outline

Back to Exam Page

 

  1. U.S. Financial Accounts
    • Flow matrix
      • Sources
      • Uses
      • interpretation of data
      • Sectors
        • Households and nonprofit organizations
        • Nonfinancial business
        • Governments
    • Instrument categories
      • Instrument tables
      • Discrepancies in the financial accounts
    • Integrated macroeconomic accounts
      • Agencies involved in production and publication
      • Conceptional basis and structure of the accounts
        • SNA methodology
        • Sectors
    • Uses of the financial account
    • As economic indicators of the economy
    • Ratio of household net worth to disposable personal income
    • Ratio of corporate and home equity to disposable personal income

       

       

  2. International Statistics and the Balance of Payments
    • BEA International Accounts
    • International Transactions Accounts (ITAs)
      • Recognizing BPM5 and BPM6
      • Balance of payments accounts
        • Conceptual data reported
        • Relationship to economic conditions
      • Current account
        • Goods and services
        • Income
      • Financial account
        • What it measures
      • Classifications of data
      • Importance to understanding the economy
    • International Investment Position (IIP)
      • Conceptual data reported
      • What data tells us

         

  3. Measuring Employment
    • Bureau of Labor Statistics
      • Employment Statistics
        • Employment Situation
          • Current Population Survey(CPS), Household Survey
          • Current Employment Statistics (CES),Payroll Survey
          • Differences in definitions/coverage
    • Household survey
      • Survey design and methodology
        • Data collection
        • Unemployment Rate, Demographic detail
        • Seasonal adjustment
        • Sample size, Confidence intervals
        • Data revisions and benchmarking, pop controls
      • Civilian Noninstitutional Population, participation rate
        • Definition (16yrs and greater etc)
      • Labor force, including not in the labor force
        • Concepts (labor force, not in the labor force, discouraged workers)
        • Characteristics
        • Recent trends
      • Employment in household survey
        • Concepts
          • Employed persons (not jobs), Employment-population ratio
        • Characteristics of the employed
          • Demographic Characteristics
          • Involuntary part-time for economic reasons
      • Unemployment
        • Concepts (unemployment, unemployment rate)
        • Characteristics of the unemployed
        • Alternative measures of labor underutilization (U1-U6)
        • Duration of unemployment
        • Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS)

           

  4. Measuring Employment
    • Payroll survey (Current Employment Statistics)
      • Survey design and methodology
        • Data collection
        • Estimation methodology
          • Birth/death estimates
        • Seasonal adjustment
          • X12 ARIMA Concurrent seasonal adjustment
          • Impact of Financial Crisis, intervention
        • Data revisions and benchmarking
      • Major uses of CES data
    • Household and payroll survey comparison

       

  5. Measuring Inflation
    • Agency collecting and reporting
    • Building blocks of the BLS CPI
      • Weighting: sources and updates
      • Data collection
        • Outlet visits
          • Disaggregation process
          • Sample period
          • Definition of price
        • Housing
          • Rental Equivalence
      • Estimating CPI
        • Stages of estimation
          • Stage 1: Laspeyres/Geometric mean
          • Stage 2: Laspeyres
        • Quality adjustment
        • Seasonal adjustment
    • Comparison of CPI Measures: CPI-U, CPI-W, CPI-E
    • Chained CPI-U
      • Substitution and weighting
      • Chained CPI-U as a cost of living measure

         

         

  6. GDP and the National Income and Product Accounts
    • What questions do the NIPAs address?
    • How are the data used?
    • Domestic income and product account (Account 1)
      • Gross domestic income and components
      • Gross domestic product
        • Expenditure categories
          • Shares
      • Relationship between GDP and GDI
    • Income and outlay accounts (Accounts 2-4)
      • Personal income and components
      • Corporate profits and components
    • Foreign transactions account (Account 5)
    • Capital account (Accounts 6 and 7)
      • Domestic saving and investment
      • International financial transactions
        • Current account
        • Capital account
    • Price measures and inflation adjustments (chaining)

       

  7. Productivity
  • Importance to the economy
  • Measures of productivity
    • Labor productivity
    • Multi-factor productivity
  • Productivity concepts of output
  • Productivity concepts of inputs
  • Changes in productivity
  • Productivity and costs news release
    • Measures reported
      • Output per hour
      • Compensation per hour
      • Unit labor costs
      • Headline measures
    • Calculating labor productivity and unit labor costs
  • Industry labor productivity
    • Importance
  • Multifactor productivity
    • Measuring inputs
  • Finding the data