The latest effort reconciles the differences among dozens of earlier measurements and includes new data to compile an estimate that is believed to be twice as accurate as previous ones, according to researchers involved.
This one comes from a paper, delivered at a NBER conference last month, on the supply dynamics of the housing boom and bust. (A hat tip goes to Benjamin Keys.) The authors crunched census data to compile the compounded annual growth rates of the population, smoothed out over five years.