Human capital is almost always identified as a crucial ingredient for growing economies, but empirical investigations of cross-national growth have done little to clarify the dimensions of relevant human capital or any implications for policy. This paper concentrates on the importance of labor...

Some analysts see the expansion of the 1990s as uniquely long and strong. Moreover, according to one popular view, the noninflationary boom can continue indefinitely. To shed some light on this debate, this paper compares the 1990s systematically with two previous long economic expansions, using...

Studies of early U.S. growth traditionally have emphasized real-sector explanations for an acceleration that by many accounts became detectable between 1815 and 1840. Interestingly, the establishment of the nation's basic financial structure predated by three decades the canals, railroads, and...

The 20th century beheld a dramatic transformation of the family. Some Kuznets style facts regarding structural change in the family are presented. Over the course of the 20th century in the United States fertility declined, educational attainment waxed, housework fell, leisure increased, jobs...

This paper evaluates the impact of slowing economic growth on labor market dynamism and misallocation. It provides a model of endogenous growth via imitation in a frictional labor market. The framework accounts for rich data on worker job-to-job transitions as well as stochastic and lifecycle...

Real exchange rates between the yen and dollar based on general price indexes overestimate the competitiveness of the United States relative to Japan. High productivity growth in the traded sector of the Japanese economy results in a continuous fall in the prices of traded goods relative to...

This paper develops a general equilibrium two country, two commodity dynamic simulation model of international trade in commodities and financial claims. The model generalizes the Heckscher-Ohlin static theory of trade by incorporating costs of quickly adjusting levels of capital stocks in...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which family income and education are obstacles to the provision of adequate diets for young children in the United States. An examination of the Health and Nutrition Examination Survey reveals the following: 1. Average nutrient intakes...

During the past 15 years employment and current dollar gross product continued to shift to the Service sector at about the same rate as in the early post-World War II period, while the Service sector's share of gross product in constant dollars remained relatively constant. Productivity (as...

It is a remarkable fact about the historical US business cycle that, after unemployment reached its peak in a recession, and a recovery began, the annual reduction in the unemployment rate was stable at around 0.55 percentage points per year. The economy seems to have had an irresistible force...