- December 10, 2025
- By Laura Ours
Collecting economic data has gotten harder as more Americans line up gig work delivering food, renting out rooms or selling wares on Etsy, and fewer individuals and businesses participate in surveys.
At the same time, technological advances have produced rich new sources of information as businesses track transactions at the item level, and provide insights that were previously unavailable.
A University of Maryland economist will co-direct a new federally funded institute aimed at tackling these challenges by modernizing the nation’s measurement of prices, output and labor market outcomes.
The Economic Measurement Research Institute (EMRI), led by UMD Distinguished University Professor of Economics Katharine Abraham and Matthew D. Shapiro, the Lawrence R. Klein Collegiate Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, aims to show how data created by households, businesses and government in the course of their ordinary activities can be leveraged to reengineer official economic statistics.
The research will produce new methods for capturing how fundamental changes in technologies alter economic outcomes for households and businesses, as well as the structure of the economy and its overall performance. EMRI was created through a three-year, $7 million award from the National Science Foundation, with additional support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It will be housed at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“The world has changed enormously since the existing methods for producing economic statistics were designed,” Abraham said. “We will be working together with the staff of the federal statistical agencies to move those methods into the 21st century.”
One of the institute’s research projects will be to update the production of statistics on retail purchases. An EMRI team that includes UMD Distinguished University Professor John Haltiwanger, Census Bureau Deputy Director Ron Jarmin, Shapiro and others is developing methods for using the wealth of information that retailers collect electronically to replace sales and price statistics constructed by surveying retail businesses.
In another EMRI-supported project, Abraham will work with two academic collaborators and Census Bureau staff to develop new information about the gig economy.
“By linking information on the earnings of non-W2 workers to information on the characteristics of those workers and their households, we’ll be able to develop a clearer understanding of who these gig workers are and how their earnings contribute to household incomes,” she said. “Having a regular set of gig economy statistics would add a lot to our understanding of how the labor market is evolving.”
Abraham noted that statistical agencies could do a lot more to exploit information already stored in electronic form, possibly in combination with existing survey data, to produce richer and more accurate labor market statistics.
“For example, data from payroll providers could help the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) produce more robust monthly payroll employment numbers. And the information contained in online job postings could allow the BLS not only to track how many jobs employers are trying to fill but also to tell a richer story about the skills required to fill those jobs and how the demand for different skill sets is changing,” Abraham said. “That sort of data could be invaluable for understanding how AI is affecting the labor market.”
Work on other EMRI projects is underway, and the EMRI will be opening calls for additional proposals to use new data sources to improve economic statistics or fill gaps in available statistics. The EMRI also will host annual research conferences to foster collaborations targeting these objectives.
“Both through work we support directly, and through fostering other projects, our goal is for the EMRI to help with moving U.S. economic statistics forward,” Abraham said. “I think we have a real opportunity to create the impetus for some significant changes.”
Katharine Abraham
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Research