The conventional wisdom is that the rising productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector in the 1980s has been driven by the apparently pervasive downsizing over this period. Aggregate evidence clearly shows falling employment accompanying the rise in productivity. In this paper, we examine the...

A longstanding puzzle of empirical economics is that average labor productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms. This paper provides a framework to assess the empirical importance of competing hypotheses for explaining the observed procyclicality. For each competing...

Used properly, the term 'new e-conomy' is warranted. Since 1995, there has been a wave of innovation associated with both the production and use of information technology that has been translated into improved US economic performance. In particular, there has been a substantial acceleration in...

Inaccurate measures of the aggregate price level may distort short-run policy decisions and may produce misleading comparisons of productivity growth across decades and among nations. This paper serves a dual purpose of reviewing compactly the vast American literature on price and output...

The evolution of unemployment in West Germany and the U. S. stands in sharp contrast, with German unemployment much lower from 1960 to the early 19705 but substantially higher from 1984 to 1988. This paper provides a framework for examining the relationship between inflation and unemployment...

This paper analyzes two-way interactions between structural reform and macro policy. If structural reforms increase the flexibility of labor markets, they are likely to improve the short-run inflation-unemployment tradeoff, providing an incentive for policymakers to expand aggregate demand....

This paper makes no contribution to an understanding of the secular slowdown in productivity, except to add a new cyclical correction of the long-run trend. Its main objective is to examine the short-run behavior of aggregate labor productivity in isolation. In addition to the phenomenon of...

This paper argues that rigid wages cannot provide the underpinnings of a universally valid theory of the business cycle, simply because wages are not universally rigid. Several different statistical techniques suggest that wage rates in the U.K. and Japan are between three and 15 times more...

This paper demonstrates that the commonly used Expectational Phillips Curve (EPC) framework cannot explain the last eighty-seven years of aggregate price behavior in the United States. The EPC explanation, which in its most general form relates price change to expected inflation and the level of...

During the four years 1995-99 U. S. productivity growth experienced a strong revival and achieved growth rates exceeding that of the golden age' of 1913-72. Accordingly many observers have declared the New Economy' (the Internet and the accompanying acceleration of technical change in computers...