This paper provides a comprehensive survey of seven aspects of rising inequality that are usually discussed separately: changes in labor’s share of income; inequality at the bottom of the income distribution, including labor mobility; skill-biased technical change; inequality among high incomes;...

A basic tenet of economic science is that productivity growth is the source of growth in real income per capita. But our results raise doubts by creating a direct link between macro productivity growth and the micro evolution of the income distribution. We show that over the entire period...

Productivity growth in the United States was considerably faster during 2000-03 than in the boom years of 1995-2000. This ebullient productivity performance raises numerous questions about its interpretation and its implications for the future, and these are stated here in the form of five...

This paper analyses two-way interactions between structural reform and macroeconomic policy. If structural reforms increase the flexibility of labour markets, they are likely to improve the short-run inflation-unemployment trade-off, providing an incentive for policy-makers to expand aggregate...

This paper estimates the NAIRU (standing for the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) as a parameter that varies over time. The NAIRU is the unemployment rate that is consistent with a constant rate of inflation. Its value is determined in an econometric model in which the inflation...

Many observers have declared the ‘New Economy’ to be an Industrial Revolution even more important than the Second Industrial Revolution of 1860-1900, and this Paper raises doubts about this comparison. It shows that the recent acceleration in productivity growth in the US economy can be...

This paper assesses the ‘one big wave’ in multi-factor productivity (MFP) growth for the United States since 1870. The wave-like pattern starts with slow MFP growth in the late 19th century, then acceleration peaking in 1928-50, and then a deceleration to a slow rate after 1972 that returns...

Throughout the post-war era until 1995 labour productivity grew faster in Europe than in the United States. Since 1995, productivity growth in the EU-15 has slowed while that in the United States has accelerated. But Europe’s productivity growth slowdown was largely offset by faster growth in...

This paper investigates the sources of the widely noticed reduction in the volatility of American business cycles since the mid 1980s. Our analysis of reduced volatility emphasizes the sharp decline in the standard deviation of changes in real GDP, of the output gap, and of the inflation rate....

After fifty years of catching up to the US level of productivity, since 1995 Europe has been falling behind. The growth rate in output per hour over 1995-2003 in Europe was just half that in the United States, and this annual growth shortfall caused the level of European productivity to fall...