The paper shows that the assessment of the speed of productivity growth crucially depends on how one chooses to measure value added. According to a widely held view, the growth rate of labour productivity has increased significantly in the U.S. since the mid-90s. The U.S. is perceived to...

I investigate whether demand growth and productivity growth in Switzerland have benefitted from the wage moderation that set in at the beginning of the 1990s in this country. The results suggest that the Swiss demand regime is profit-led while the productivity regime is wage-led. This means on...

: This text contains the winter forecast 2014 of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, released on 17 December 2014. We present the recent economic developments in Switzerland and abroad, and discusses the main forecast results in the various sectors of the economy. We expect the Swiss...

The paper suggests a consistent interpretation for the much debated Z-footnote on pp. 55-56 of the General Theory and discards claims recently made in the literature concerning the importance of output heterogeneity for Keynes’s macroeconomic approach.

The paper examines the nexus between inventory investment and the change in aggregate production during the "Great Recession" of 2008/09 for 29 European countries. A fairly uniform pattern emerges. Inventory investment is positively correlated with changes in production and follows the latter...

Against the backdrop of Baumol’s model of ‘unbalanced growth’, a recent strand of literature has presented models that manage to reconcile structural change with Kaldor’s ‘stylized fact’ of the relative constancy of per-capita GDP growth. Another strand of literature goes beyond...