Regulatory Rules and Estimating Economic Growth: Two Perspectives on Expensing Employee Stock Options

摘要

Users of government economic statistics may be surprised to learn that not all are direct products of purpose-designed surveys. Financial statements, tax records, administrative regulatory data, and private-industry records are important sources of information. These nonsur-vey data sources, which are not designed expressly for the construction of national statistics, vary in their quality and timeliness and are affected by changes in the rules that underlie their primary purposes. Moreover, those data typically have to be adjusted by statistical agencies to reflect the economic concepts being measured (rather than the tax or regulatory concepts on which they rely). Therefore, government economic statistics generally diverge from statistics based on private sector or regulatory agency data, and they are subject to being updated over time as more tax and administrative data become available. A deeper knowledge of the sources of statistical agency data and the adjustments made to those can help data users avoid confusion.