For many households, paying lower borrowing costs is the surest, fastest way to increase net worth. Using administrative, credit bureau and survey data on U.S. credit cards, we find pervasive and systematic cross-individual variation in borrowing costs. Credit risk and product differentiation explain about one-third of that variation. The remaining riskadjusted dispersion can materially affect ...

We introduce a factor analysis model that summarizes the dependencies between observed variable groups, instead of dependencies between individual variables as standard factor analysis does. A group may correspond to one view of the same set of objects, one of many data sets tied by co-occurrence, or a set of alternative variables collected from statistics tables to measure one property of inte...

The history of economic growth measurement has been one of intimate interplay with economic theorizing, leading from improvements in the accuracy and relevance of growth data, to hypotheses on the critical sources of economic growth, to explaining deep changes in the structure of national economies. Total factor productivity (TFP), previously a measurement residual to be minimized, has since be...