The Fed kept interest rates low and essentially unchanged during the late 1990s despite a booming economy and record-low unemployment. These interest rates were accommodative by historical standards. Nonetheless, inflation remained low. How did the Fed succeed in sustaining rapid economic growth...

Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more...

Specialization is a powerful source of productivity gains, but how production networks at the industry level are related to aggregate productivity in the data is an open question. We construct a database of input-output tables covering a broad spectrum of countries and times, develop a...

This paper provides estimates of the economic impact of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in China and India for the period 2012-2030. Our estimates are derived using WHO's EPIC model of economic growth, which focuses on the negative effects of NCDs on labor supply and capital accumulation. We...

Investment in a broad array of intangible capital - R&D, organizational capital, worker training, and brand equity - has occurred in many of the most advanced world economies and has been found to be an important source of economic growth. This evidence suggests that intangible capital formation...

Average income per capita in the countries of the OECD was more than 20 times larger in 2000 than that of the poorest countries of sub-Sahara Africa and elsewhere, and many of the latter are not only falling behind the world leaders, but have even regressed in recent years. At the same time,...

We propose a novel framework to analyse the macroeconomic impact of noncommunicable diseases. We incorporate measures of disease prevalence into a human capital augmented production function, which enables us to determine the economic costs of chronic health conditions in terms of foregone gross...

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the effects of health on economic growth. The micro-based approach tends to find smaller effects than the macro-based approach, thus presenting a micro-macro puzzle regarding the economic return on health. We reconcile these two...

Expanded international data from the PIAAC survey of adult skills allow us to analyze potential sources of the cross-country variation of comparably estimated labor-market returns to skills in a more diverse set of 32 countries. Returns to skills are systematically larger in countries that have...