A puzzling development over the past 15 years is decline in Total Factor Productivity in many advanced economies. Part of this decline may be due to the rapid growth of free digital goods. Statistical agencies have no reliable way to measure the benefits of the introduction of free goods. This...

This paper develops a new framework for measuring prices and quantities of commercial properties. In particular, it addresses problems associated with obtaining separate estimates for the land and structure components of a property. A key contribution is to address the problem of estimating...

This paper provides methodologies for evaluating consumer benefits of infrastructure services using potentially observable information. We define benefit measures for consumers and, using general principles from the index number literature, derive alternative first and second order...

This paper examines the impact of investment in research and innovation on Australian market sector productivity. While previous studies have largely focused on a narrow class of private sector intangible assets as a source of productivity gains, this paper shows that there is a broad range of...

Consumers are very responsive to sales, yet statistical agency practice typically under-weights sale prices in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), with some agencies excluding sale prices completely. Evidence is lacking on how this may impact on both the representativeness of prices included in the...

In a contribution to the sparse literature on the impacts on consumers of quarantine restrictions, an innovative approach to analyzing the effects of these policies on the prices and quality of imported products is proposed. Specifically, various index number decompositions at different...

Definitions of output and input are key to studies of productivity analysis, as they are to the national accounts of countries. This paper systematically reviews alternative definitions at production unit and aggregate levels, illustrating the different perspectives that they provide on...

Christopher Gilbert and David Vines (eds.), The World Bank: Structure and Policies Martin Shubik, The Theory of Money and Financial Institutions, Vol. I Ben Fine, Social Capital Theory versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium Heinz D. Kurz,...

We evaluate New Zealand's macroeconomic performance over the 1967-1996 period, which witnessed numerous economic reforms. Using both index-number and econometric techniques, we decompose nominal GDP growth and the output gap into contributions from price level changes, productivity growth and...