This paper looks at the history of money and its modern form from a scientific and mathematical point of view. The approach here is to emphasize simplicity. A straightforward model and algebraic formula for a large economy analogous to the ideal gas law of thermodynamics is proposed. It may be...

Views of the future China vary widely. While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the U.S. This paper examines the economic growth prospects of China over the next two decades. Extrapolating past...

Views of the future China vary widely. While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the U.S. This paper examines the economic growth prospects of China over the next two decades. Extrapolating past...

This paper applies parametric and nonparametric techniques to the most recent data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) 1992- 2000 and shows the returns to schooling increased over the course of transition, overall and for attainment cohorts neither at the top nor bottom of the...

This paper analyzes some of the implications of North American labor market integration for fiscal policy. The economies of Canada and the US are both characterized by highly integrated internal markets for goods and services as well as for labor and capital, and subnational governments in both...

Using PSID data for the years 1984 to 1999, we estimate the level and severity of asset poverty. Our results indicate that the share of asset- poor households remained almost the same and the severity of poverty increased during this period, despite the growth in the economy and the financial...

The position taken by William Barnett in this panel discussion is that federal government agencies, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics, view researchers as being among those who comprise the audience for produced data, but not necessarily the most important members of that audience....

After a decade of structural reforms, unemployment rates have tripled in Argentina. This paper is concerned with the measurement of unemployment risk and its distribution. We show the importance of considering re-incidence in the measurement of risk and develop a methodology. Our estimates for...

This work attempts to shed light on the “information technology productivity paradox”. Employing a large data set of Italian manufacturing firms we compute ICT marginal productivity across different cluster of firms and the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on output...

The Malmquist productivity index has many attractive features. One is that it decomposes into a technical efficiency change index and a technical change index. Under constant returns to scale, its technical efficiency change index has been decomposed into a "pure" technical efficiency change...