In this paper we employ index number theory in addressing the problem of adjusting real national income and real domestic product for changes in a country's terms of trade. More specifically, using recent developments in the theory of production, we address the problems related to measuring: (i)...

The standard source for pre-WWII global freight rate trends is the Isserlis British tramp shipping index. We think it is flawed, and that its sources offer vastly more information than the Isserlis aggregate contains. The new data confirm the precipitous decline in nominal freight rates before...

In recent papers, Nelson and Pack (1995) , Rodrik (1997), and Hsieh (1997a) argue that standard measures of total factor productivity growth in countries where the capital-labour ratio has risen rapidly, e.g. the East Asian NICS, will understate true productivity growth if the elasticity of...

Increases in purchased services, foreign outsourcing, and investments in computers are alleged to have resulted in an understatement of input growth in manufacturing, and thus. overstatement of growth in productivity. GNP, and value-added in industries heavily engaged in these activities. Based...

The paper describes the background for my original "hedonics" paper (Griliches 1961) and discusses some of the issues raised by the subsequent literature on this range of topics. It goes on to consider some of the implications of this work for the measurement of capital services and connects it...

This paper describes a new, industry-adjusted index of state environmental compliance costs from 1977 to 1994. The index has two principal advantages: it controls for states' industrial compositions, and it can be calculated for 17 years, thus facilitating comparisons both among states and...

We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word "uncertainty" in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the...

Much of the opposition to indexation as a means of adapting to on going inflation arises from the view that indexation is itself inflationary. This paper examines the basis for that view in a simple macroeconomic model in which budget deficits are in part financed through the printing of money....

No cross-sectional consumer price index is currently available by state, and the BLS's cross-sectional "family budget" index for metropolitan areas is not well-suited for cross-state analyses. In this paper we propose an algorithm for constructing a state-specific Laspeyres price index using...

The composite index of leading indicators is found to be a valuable tool for predicting not only the direction but also the size of near- term changes in aggregate economic activity. This conclusion is based on assessments of the leading index as a predictor of (1) business cycle turning points...