The paper shows that the assessment of the speed of productivity growth crucially depends on how one chooses to measure value added. According to a widely held view, the growth rate of labour productivity has increased significantly in the U.S. since the mid-90s. The U.S. is perceived to...

In a recent paper, I argued that Baumol's model of 'unbalanced growth' offers a ready explanation for the observed secular rise in Health Care Expenditure (HCE) in rich countries. Baumol's model implies that HCE is driven by wage increases in excess of productivity growth. I tested this...

Our aim is to disclose robust explanatory variables for health care expenditure (HCE) growth by introducing to this field of research a method that is especially well suited for situations of 'model uncertainty': the Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA). We analyse data for 33 OECD countries over the...

Okun’s law postulates a stable relationship between quarterly output growth and changes in (un)employment. This proposition has so far been tested with macroeconomic data at the highest level of aggregation. The article goes beyond that in extending the analysis to industry data from...

Der Aufsatz gibt einen Überblick über die Quellen von Verzerrungen des US-amerikanischen Konsumentenpreisindexes (CPI) nach oben sowie nach unten und diskutiert die Maßnahmen, die das Bureau of Labor Statistics ergriffen hat, um sie zu beseitigen. Die verbliebenen Verzerrungen werden...