Two commonly used sources of aggregate expenditure data are personal consumption expenditures in the National Income an d Product Accounts and the Consumer Expenditure Surveys administered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The author adjusts b oth data sources to incorporate the service flows from owner-occupied housing and other consumer durables. A comparison of the two estimat es of aggregate expenditure reveals that the differences between the tw o data sets have been growing over time. By 1989 the level of aggregat e expenditure in the national accounts exceeds that reported in the Consumer Expenditure Surveys by $1224 billions. Less than half of th is difference can be attributed to definitional differences in the two data sources.

McDonald, James B., and Richard J. Butler, Some Generalized Mixture Distributions with an Application to Unemployment Duration, this REVIEW 69 (May 1987), 232-240. Podgursky, Michael, and Paul Swaim, Duration of Joblessness Following Displacement, Industrial Relations 26 (Fall 1987), 213-226. Prentice, Ross L., A Log Gamma Model and Its Maximum Likelihood Estimation, Biometrika 61 (Dec. 1974), 539-544. Swaim, Paul, and Michael Podgursky, Advance Notice and Job Search: The Value of an Early Start, Journal of Human Resources 25 (Spring 1990), 148-178.