In several articles published in the 1990s, de Long and Summers argued that investment in producer durables had a high propensity to generate externalities in using industries, resulting in a systematic and substantial divergence between its social and private return. They maintained, moreover,...

This paper considers the productivity impact on the U.S. economy of the period of war mobilization and demobilization lasting from 1941 to 1948. Optimists have pointed to learning by doing in military production and spinoffs from military R and D as the basis for asserting a substantial positive...

At the time they occurred, the savings and loan insolvencies were considered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Contrary to what was then believed, and in sharp contrast with 2007-09, they in fact had little macroeconomic significance. S&L remediation cost between 2 and 3...

At the time they occurred, the savings and loan insolvencies were considered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Contrary to what was then believed, and in sharp contrast with 2007-09, they in fact had little macroeconomic significance. S&L remediation cost between 2 and 3...

The empirical work in Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty First Century is simply breathtaking, but his use of the terms capital and marketable wealth interchangeably leads us to consider the implications of distinguishing between them, and calls our attention to important issues that deserve...

Is there a silver lining to Depression? This paper examines one instance where economic downturn appears to have given a permanent boost to productivity: the U.S. railroad industry during the Depression

Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong view US economic policy extending up to 1980 as pragmatically fostering growth. This they interpret as the Hamiltonian tradition, and their intent is to rescue policy debate from the data- and logic-free quagmire into which they believe it has fallen....

This chapter examines the historical record of manufacturing productivity growth in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth century in the context of broader trends in private non-farm economy productivity. TFP growth in manufacturing peaked in the 1920s and has trended generally...

This chapter begins with an overview of the logic and conceptual underpinnings of national income and product measures (part I). Part II describes developments beginning in the 1930s that led to the modern approaches and conventions regarding how we should measure these aggregates. Part III...

Manufacturing was responsible for almost all - 83 percent - of the growth of total factor productivity in the U.S. private nonfarm economy between 1919 and 1929. During the Depression manufacturing TFP growth was not as uniformly distributed, and only half as rapid, accounting for only 48...