This paper provides three perspectives on long-run growth rates of labor productivity (LP) and of multi-factor productivity (MFP) for the U. S. economy. It extracts statistical growth trends for labor productivity from quarterly data for the total economy going back to 1952, provides new...

This paper provides three perspectives on long-run growth rates of labor productivity (LP) and of multi-factor productivity (MFP) for the U. S. economy. It extracts statistical growth trends for labor productivity from quarterly data for the total economy going back to 1952, provides new...

After the collapse of housing markets during the Great Depression, the U.S. government played a large role in shaping the future of housing finance and policy. Soon thereafter, housing markets witnessed the largest boom in recent history. The objective in this paper is to quantify the...

The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the...

Usually, current Financial Crisis of 2008 is compared to the Great Depression of 1929. But there are some evidences that our current financial crisis has much more similarities and analogies to the crisis initiated by the panic in 1907. A brief analysis of both crises is presented. This analysis...

Time series filtering methods such as the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, with a consensual choice of the smoothing parameter, eliminate the possibility of identifying long swing cycles (e.g., Kondratieff type) or, alternatively, may distort periodicities that are in fact present in the data,...

L’application de l’analyse spectrale au domaine cliométrique a été jusqu’à présente restreinte. Elle est employée ici pour déterminer la périodicité des séries agrégées de brevets de la France, de l’Allemagne, de la Grande-Bretagne et des Etats-Unis. Après avoir rappelé la...

The question of economic cycles’ origin is still one of the most actual problems. In inorganic nature the wave process appears as a form of system’s existence and as reaction of environment against outside disturbance. Socium as an environment, a separate element of which is a human being,...

Looking back to the 1930s provides the opportunity to examine one severe mortgage crisis as we live through another. This paper examines the development of the residential mortgage market during the 1920s, the institutional disruptions that occurred in the 1930s and the policy response of...

Although firm financial policies were affected by a credit contraction during the recent financial crisis, the impact of increased uncertainty and decreased growth opportunities was stronger than that of the credit contraction per se. From the start of the financial crisis (third quarter of...