Special Reports
Special Reports
Some subjects cannot be handled in a primer. The four reports below take a single question and follow it far enough to be genuinely useful — the institutional history, the mechanics, the evidence, and the places where careful people still disagree. Each is written to be read on its own and assumes no prior background.
They share a method. Describe how the thing is built before saying what it shows; name the source and link to it; separate what is measured from what is inferred; and where the answer is contested, set out the competing positions rather than choosing one.
The reports
Housing Finance and the Government-Sponsored Enterprises
How the modern mortgage market was assembled, what a government-sponsored enterprise actually is, why an implicit guarantee is both valuable and hard to price, and how the accounting problems of the early 2000s turned into the conservatorship of 2008. The clearest available case study in how a hybrid public-private institution behaves when its incentives are ambiguous — and the subject of this site's most-cited legacy page.
Ten Recurring Misreadings of Economic Statistics
The same handful of errors appear in economic coverage year after year, in every country, across the political spectrum. This report collects ten of them, explains in each case what the statistic actually measures, and shows how the misreading arises. It is the most practically useful page here for anyone who reads business news regularly.
What It Means to Cost a Climate Policy
Where the enormous published cost estimates for climate measures come from, why credible studies disagree by an order of magnitude, what a discount rate does to a result, and why realised compliance costs have so often come in below the projections. A guide to reading the numbers rather than an argument about the policy.
How the Monthly Jobs Numbers Are Built
A step-by-step account of the two surveys behind a national employment report: who is sampled, how the seasonal adjustment works, why the estimates are revised twice, how big the revisions typically are, and what an announced corporate layoff does and does not tell you about aggregate employment.
On the older reports
This address published research reports for several years in the 2000s, and a number of those pages are still linked from elsewhere on the web. Those studies belonged to a different editorial project with a different purpose, and they have not been reproduced here. Where a legacy report address is still in use, it now leads to whichever of the reports above covers the same underlying subject, so that a reader following an old citation arrives at current material on the topic they were looking for rather than at an error page.
For shorter treatments of the same subjects, see the issue primers. For the reporting mechanics that run through all four reports, see The Balance Sheet.