Although inflation is much feared for its negative effects on the economy, how to measure it is a matter of considerable debate that has important implications for interest rates, monetary supply, and investment and spending decisions. Underlying many of these issues is the concept of the...

The celebrated economist Zvi Griliches’s entire career can be viewed as an attempt to advance the cause of accuracy in economic measurement. His interest in the causes and consequences of technical progress led to his pathbreaking work on price hedonics, now the principal analytical technique...

Emerging from the ruins of the Second World War, the Japanese economy has grown at double-digit rate throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s, and, when the oil crisis of the 1970s slowed growth throughout the industrialized world, Japanese growth throughout the industrialized world, Japanese...

More than half a decade has passed since the bursting of the housing bubble and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. In retrospect, what is surprising is that these events and their consequences came as such a surprise. What was it that prevented most of the world from recognizing the impending...

Emerging from the ruins of the Second World War, the Japanese economy has grown at double-digit rate throughout much of the 1950s and 1960s, and, when the oil crisis of the 1970s slowed growth throughout the industrialized world, Japanese growth throughout the industrialized world, Japanese...

The productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s and the resumption of productivity growth in the 1990s have provoked controversy among policymakers and researchers. Economists have been forced to reexamine fundamental questions of measurement technique. Some researchers argue that econometric...