We examine the role of the ICT revolution in driving productivity growth behavior for the United States and an aggregate of ten Western European nations (the EU-10) from 1977 to 2015. We find that the standard growth accounting approach is deficient when it separates sources of growth between...

The principal rationales that give rise to financial intermediation are benefits of size and specialization, the diversification of specific asset risks, and the pooling of even broader classes of risk. Each is a significant factor in accounting for the U.S. economy's reliance on intermediation....

The U.S. economy's nonfinancial debt ratio has risen since 1980 to a level that is extraordinary in comparison with prior historical experience. Approximately one-half of this rise has consisted of increased indebtedness (relative to income) of borrowers in the economy's private sector,...

The observed reluctance of most individuals in the United States to buy individual life annuities, and the concomitant approximately flat average age-wealth profile, stand in sharp contradiction to the standard life cycle model of consumption-saving behavior. The analysis in this paper lends...

The United States achieved a 2.0 percent average annual growth rate of real GDP per capita between 1891 and 2007. This paper predicts that growth in the 25 to 40 years after 2007 will be much slower, particularly for the great majority of the population. Future growth will be 1.3 percent per...

The Phillips curve was init-ally formulated as a relationship between the rate of change and unemployment, yet what matters for stabilization policy is the rate of inflation, not the rate of wage change. This paper provides new estimates of Phillips curves for both prices and wages extending...

The evidence presented in this paper leads to three conclusions about possible effects on the U.S. long-term capital. raising mechanism due to the sharp increase in interest rate volatility that has followed the Federal Reserve System's adoption of new monetary policy procedures in 1979. First,...

Short-term interest rates in the United States have been "too high" since October 1979 in the sense that both unconditional and conditional forecasts, based on an estimated vector autoregression model summarizing the prior experience,under predict short-term interest rates during this period....

A familiar question raised by the Federal Reserve System's evolving use of money growth targets over the past twenty years is whether monetary policymakers had sound economic reasons for changing their procedures as they did -- either in adopting money growth targets in the first place, or in...